03:22 PM EST, 01/27/2025 (MT Newswires) -- S&P 500 companies' latest quarterly earnings have surprised to the upside so far, pointing to "promising" early signs for the reporting season, Oppenheimer Asset Management said Monday.

Some 16% of the companies in the benchmark equity index have already logged results, with earnings up nearly 17% year over year on sales growth of 4.7%, according to Oppenheimer. Before the start of the season, Bloomberg's bottom-up estimates put analysts' projected earnings growth at 7.3%, the brokerage said.

Still, it is "too early to tell what the final tallies of this earnings season will look like," Oppenheimer Asset Management Chief Investment Strategist John Stoltzfus said.

Among sectors, technology companies' earnings have surged 44% year over year for the quarter, followed by financials at 28%. Real estate and communication services have logged double-digit percentage gains. Materials' earnings are down 19%, with consumer discretionary also posting a decrease, according to the note.

In terms of sales, tech has seen 12% growth, followed by financials at 11%. Industrials, materials and consumer discretionary sales have dropped from a year earlier, Oppenheimer said.

Several major names are scheduled to report results later this week, including mega-caps Apple ( AAPL ) , Microsoft ( MSFT ) , Meta Platforms ( META ) , and Tesla (TSLA).

"We remain positive on equity markets stateside, with fixed income looking complementary for portfolio diversification and current income," Stoltzfus said.

The Federal Reserve's two-day monetary policy meeting is scheduled to begin Tuesday, with a decision on its benchmark lending rate due Wednesday. Markets widely expect the central bank's Federal Open Market Committee to hold interest rates steady, according to the CME FedWatch tool.

"Other than the resilience evident in stateside economic activity, the fact that the Fed has been able to avoid pushing the economy into a recession -- nearly three years from when it entered a tightening cycle in March of 2022 through September of last year -- suggests marked progress against inflation even as the Fed's 2% target remains elusive," Stoltzfus wrote in the Monday note.

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