This week's sweep of quarterly surprise data pulled from FMP's Earnings Surprises Bulk API surfaced a narrow cluster of companies still maintaining clean, unbroken beat patterns. The screen isolates which names continue to compound operating leverage quarter after quarter — the kind of repeatability that tends to hold up even as sector flows churn. In this note, we break down how the API's full-universe pull makes those streaks visible and why these five companies remain outliers in the current earnings cycle.

Five Companies Setting the Pace

GM General Motors Company

Beat Streak: 12 quarters.
Next quarterly report: Jan. 27 — EPS: $2.21; Revenue: $45.65B (consensus).

Its most recent print — Q3 2025 — the company delivered a sharp blowout: adjusted EPS came in at $2.80 vs. the expected ~$2.28, while revenue landed ~$48.6B, comfortably above the ~$45.3B forecast. This isn't just a one-off beat. GM raised its full-year profit guidance after the result, citing strong demand for pickups and SUVs, eased tariff headwinds, and a strategic slowdown in its EV production plan that should improve margins going into 2026 (Q3 earnings release).

Why this matters: GM's beat-and-raise signals that legacy automakers are still capable of generating resilient cash flow and buffer against macro headwinds — even as the EV narrative dominates headlines. For analysts and value-oriented investors, the surprise suggests there's still duration in “old auto,” especially if tariff pressures remain muted.

What to watch next is how durable the demand for ICE trucks/SUVs stays, and the profitability trajectory of GM's EV and services businesses. A deep dive into GM's segment-level margins (e.g. ICE vs EV, North America vs International) would help map the structural shift.

TSEM Tower Semiconductor Ltd.

Beat Streak: 8 consecutive quarters.
Next quarterly report: Feb. 9 — EPS: $0.67; Revenue: $439.81M (consensus).

This consistency in results through volatile macro conditions flags TSEM as a semiconductor mid-cap with decent execution discipline. The beat streak implies solid demand and likely disciplined cost control or favorable product mix across cycles — a valuable signal in an industry prone to boom-bust dynamics.

From a thematic perspective, TSEM's run suggests that niche/constrained-capability foundries may outperform broader-capacity suppliers as companies become more selective about supply-chain risk and demand.

What will be interesting to monitor next is order backlog, capacity utilization, and margins per wafer — not just headline EPS or revenue. Data from backlog disclosures or segmental revenue per product line would help anticipate whether TSEM's current streak has underlying durable momentum or is benefiting from one-off tailwinds or near-term restocking.

URBN Urban Outfitters, Inc.

Beat Streak: 7 quarters.
Next quarterly report: Feb. 25 — EPS: $1.34; Revenue: $1.77B (consensus).

For Urban Outfitters, a beat streak likely reflects disciplined inventory management, lean cost structure, and perhaps selective pricing power despite consumer softness. In a retail environment where many chains are cutting margins or piling up discount inventory — a consistent beat streak can be a signal of operational health and brand resilience, rather than cyclical luck.

What to watch — especially ahead of the release — is whether same-store sales (comp vs prior periods), margin expansion (gross margin + SG&A control), and inventory-to-sales ratio remain healthy. Looking at the retail-segment income statement and inventory disclosures could reveal whether URBN's outperformance is structurally sustainable or tied to favorable seasonality or pulsing demand pockets.

LCII LCI Industries

Beat Streak: 4 quarters.
Next quarterly report: Feb. 10 — EPS: $0.59; Revenue: $901M (consensus).

LCI's modest-size but consistent outperformance in a cyclical environment suggests a niche capital-goods business with either stable demand, good order backlog visibility, or superior cost discipline. In industries like RV parts, manufactured housing components, or other durable-goods segments, beat streaks tend to imply that order cycles are holding up and the business is executing operationally.

This kind of consistency offers a slightly different flavor of beat — less flash than high-growth tech or retail, but perhaps more stable.

Going forward, key datasets to watch would be order backlog, book-to-bill ratio, cash flow from operations, and cap-ex — they'll illuminate whether LCII is riding a solid demand trough or simply squeezing margins through cost control.

DAL Delta Air Lines, Inc.

Beat Streak: 4 quarters.
Next quarterly report: Jan. 9 — EPS: $1.75; Revenue: $15.65B (consensus).

In Q3 2025, Delta reported record revenue (operating revenue $16.7B) and solid profitability despite a cooling macro environment. The strength was driven by premium cabin demand, corporate travel resilience, and recurring loyalty/revenue-stream growth (e.g., credit-card co-brand revenues, cargo, ancillary services) — a structural shift away from volume-heavy, low-margin main-cabin reliance (Q3 earnings release).

This beat pattern suggests that airline earnings are increasingly tied less to broad leisure travel cycles and more to differentiated demand segments (premium, corporate, loyalty), capacity discipline, and diversified revenue — a model better suited for uncertain macro environments. Investors should now focus on forward-looking metrics: unit revenue (PRASM/TRASM), capacity adjustments, cost per available seat mile (CASM, especially nonfuel), and guidance for corporate and loyalty segment growth. These datasets will be far more telling than headline EPS if Delta is to maintain beat streaks into 2026.

Reading the Signal Beneath the Streaks

Individually, each streak highlights a different operational strength; taken together, the five companies outline a broader pattern. The names still clearing expectations are the ones leaning on durable mechanics—margin control, stable capacity, disciplined inventory, predictable backlog, and resilient revenue mix—rather than short-lived bursts of upside.

Understanding those dynamics requires widening the lens beyond a single surprise feed. The Earnings Surprises Bulk API shows who beat, but explaining why demands additional layers: margin progression from the Income Statement API, cap-ex cadence from the Cash Flow Statement API, valuation drift from Price Target and Analyst Estimates, and insider alignment via the Insider Trades endpoint. Viewed in combination, these datasets tend to reveal the same profile: companies with steady operating leverage and no signs of managerial overreach.

That broader framing also gains depth when placed in macro context. This analysis on validating earnings surprises against economic indicators underscores how streak persistence often lines up with shifts in underlying momentum. Pulling those threads together helps distinguish streaks driven by structural improvement from those simply riding an unchanged expectations bar.

The takeaway is straightforward: reliable beat streaks rarely hinge on luck. In this cycle, the companies rising through the FMP screen share a common trait — their fundamentals are moving faster than consensus can adjust.

Constructing a Repeatability Filter with FMP Data

If the goal is to surface companies that consistently outperform expectations, the most efficient approach is to cast the net wide first and let the data handle the narrowing. Instead of scanning tickers one by one, you start by pulling the full universe of quarterly surprises and then work your way down to streak behavior. The Earnings Surprises Bulk API is designed for exactly that kind of top-down pass.

Before you start, make sure you have an active API key.

1. Pull Bulk Earnings Surprises

Begin by hitting the Earnings Surprises Bulk API, which aggregates every quarterly EPS surprise — positive or negative — for the year you specify:

https://financialmodelingprep.com/stable/earnings-surprises-bulk?year=2025&apikey=YOUR_API_KEY

Sample Response:

[

{

"symbol": "AMKYF",

"date": "2025-07-09",

"epsActual": 0.3631,

"epsEstimated": 0.3615,

"lastUpdated": "2025-07-09"

}

]

From here, the first cut is mechanical: isolate the entries where epsActual > epsEstimated. That gives you the universe of names that beat expectations at least once during the period — essentially a raw pool before you evaluate whether any of them can deliver that result consistently.

2. Retrieve Company-Level Details

With the preliminary list built, shift to the second layer: continuity. For each ticker that survived the first screen, pull its full quarterly earnings record using the Earnings Report API:

https://financialmodelingprep.com/stable/earnings?symbol=AAPL&apikey=YOUR_API_KEY

Walking through these histories allows you to tally how many periods in a row each company has outperformed. The threshold is yours to set — some desks treat three consecutive beats as meaningful, while others tighten the criteria by requiring a minimum surprise size to filter out statistical noise. Whatever the rules, the output is the same: a repeatability map for each name that shows not just whether they beat, but how reliably and with what degree of clarity they've done so.

Expanding Coverage as the Universe Widens

A good way to validate the streak logic is to start on the Free plan, which already includes major names like AAPL, GOOGL, and JPM — enough breadth to confirm that the methodology works before scaling it. Once the rules feel stable, the Starter plan becomes the natural next step, since it opens up the full U.S. equity universe and gives the screen more balanced sector and market-cap representation.

If you want to compare patterns across regions, the Premium plan brings U.K. and Canadian companies into the mix, allowing the same repeatability framework to run globally without leaving holes in the dataset.

Scaling the Framework Across the Firm

Once the beat-streak logic proves reliable in day-to-day work, the real leverage comes from lifting it out of an individual analyst's toolkit and turning it into a shared institutional process. A screen that lives only on one desk has limited impact; a screen that sits inside a common research layer becomes a reference point for portfolio teams, strategists, and risk functions without each group rebuilding its own version.

Centralizing the underlying data makes it easier for teams to adjust parameters—streak length, surprise thresholds, margin behavior—while still working within a unified framework. Analysts gain stable narrative baselines, PMs can integrate the signal directly into position sizing or factor models, and risk teams benefit from the audit trails and revision history that come with a controlled data pipeline.

To operationalize that level of consistency, the workflow needs infrastructure that supports version control, permissioning, and model lineage. This is where the structure of the Enterprise plan fits naturally: it provides the environment where shared dashboards, governance layers, and cross-team workflows can run off the same validated inputs. At that point, the beat-streak screen stops being a bespoke model and becomes a firmwide signal—one that scales cleanly across teams, reviews, and time.

Turning Past Beats Into Forward Indicators

Once repeatability is measured, the screen shifts from a backward-looking tally to a real-time gauge of operational traction. By continuing to monitor quarterly surprises through the Earnings Surprises Bulk API, the same logic that surfaced past streaks becomes a live signal for which businesses are steadily building momentum — and which ones are starting to slip.

Want more? Explore our earlier article: Five Large DCF Disconnects Flagged by the FMP API (Week of Nov 17-21)