What is a Yearly Growth Rate?

The Yearly Growth Rate chart for Wal-mart Stores (WMT) compares annual sales cycles.

Purposefully, companies prefer to measure earnings progress based on annual sales trends because this helps distill the seasonal anomalies that often take place every year. The entire year’s results, if measured at the same time, provide a good measure of the EPS growth associated with the company.

However, EPS growth rates do not always reveal sales trends; other idiosyncrasies are often involved with the operations of large companies, and sometimes companies are able to report earnings that did not seem probable given conditions. The notion of ‘padding earnings’ has been popularized, especially in banking stocks, and the impact is usually reflected in the Yearly Growth Rate.

Where other acute measures of EPS growth can reveal more, the Yearly Growth Rate of a company should be used as a general gauge, or a starting point, when observing the growth trends of a company.

From there, investors should take a closer look at the results.

How is the Yearly Growth Rate Calculated?

The Percentage Yearly Growth Rate = [(EPS (ttm) this quarter - EPS (ttm) the same quarter last year)/EPS (ttm) the same quarter last year)]*100