In the past couple of months, the FTSE 250 has started to climb while the FTSE 100 has stayed pretty much flat.
Is the mid-cap index ready for another spell of beating the top-drawer stocks? Forecasts show some big earnings rises across the index.
Baked-in success
Greggs (LSE: GRG) shares are up by 40% in the past five years, climbing nicely ahead of the FTSE 250. And they just got an extra 5% boost (at least at the time of writing) from H1 results released on Tuesday (30 July).
The latest figures show a 14% rise in sales, with profit before tax up 16%, but that’s not what I’m looking at today.
No, I’ve been poking around broker forecasts. They show a slight fall in earnings per share (EPS) for Greggs for the 2024 full year. But the company has just posted a 15% rise in the first half.
That is an underlying diluted figure and it excludes exceptionals. But it suggests that forecasts might just be…
