Markets
GM Beat and Fell 7%. GE Aerospace Beat, Raised Guidance and Fell 4%. 3M Rose 6% and RTX Booked a Record $340 Billion Backlog: One Morning of Industrial Earnings
Four industrial companies reported before the open on October 20 and the market graded them on their outlooks, not their quarters. General Motors earned an adjusted $3.70 a share against $3.63 expected on record revenue near $50 billion and fell 6.84% because the midpoint of its narrowed 2026 range, $13.25, was below the $13.41 Wall Street had. GE Aerospace beat with $2.25 and raised its full-year range to $8.00 to $8.10 and lost 3.67% as free cash flow fell 14%. 3M rose 5.78% on $2.50 a share and a 26.2% margin, and RTX gained 0.64% on a $340 billion backlog.
Earnings season reached the industrials on Tuesday, and the lesson was the one the banks taught a week earlier: the quarter is the entry ticket, the outlook is the trade. General Motors reported adjusted earnings of $3.70 a share for the third quarter against a $3.63 consensus, on revenue of about $50 billion, a record, and announced a new $20 billion share repurchase authorisation. It also narrowed its 2026 adjusted earnings range to a midpoint of $13.25 a share, below the $13.41 that analysts polled by LSEG had expected, and said tariff costs would land at the low end of $2.5 to $3.5 billion. The shares fell as much as 9% to $75.08 and closed down 6.84% at $77.09; coverage pointed at commodity inflation, logistics and memory-chip costs, and at the absence of a raise in the operating-profit range, more than at tariffs.
GE Aerospace produced the better numbers and the same reaction. Adjusted earnings of $2.25 a share beat the $2.00 expected, revenue of $13.29 billion beat $12.85 billion, orders rose 49%, and the company raised its 2026 earnings guidance to $8.00 to $8.10 a share from $7.65 to $7.85 and its free-cash-flow range to $9.1 to $9.4 billion, the fourth straight quarter it has lifted its outlook. Free cash flow in the quarter itself fell 14%, and sales discounts and allowances rose sharply on new engine deliveries and spare-parts reserves. The stock, which had closed at $311.28 on Monday, fell 3.67% to $299.87 after trading as low as $294.22.
3M was the day's Dow leader. Adjusted earnings of $2.50 a share topped the $2.39 estimate by 4.6%, revenue of $6.58 billion was a touch below the $6.61 billion expected, organic sales grew 3.3%, and the operating margin widened to 26.2%; the company said it remains confident of more than 3.5% organic growth for the year. The shares rose 5.78% to $171.37, a week after a $6 billion data-centre supply agreement with Amazon had lifted them 3%. RTX reported adjusted earnings of $2.26 a share, up 33% and well above the $1.78 consensus, though about 25 cents of that came from the recovery of tariff-related costs, on revenue of $25.0 billion; it raised full-year sales guidance to $97.0 to $97.5 billion and earnings to $7.65 to $7.75, and its backlog reached a record $340 billion, up 36% in a year. The stock added 0.64% to $193.34, and Northrop Grumman, which reports later in the week, rose 4.57% to $534.00.
The Dow rose 1.02% on the day and the industrial-sector ETF outperformed the S&P 500, which gained 0.28%. Boeing reports on October 27, Caterpillar on October 29, and the pattern of the week suggests both will need to raise rather than confirm. Record revenue at GM and a record backlog at RTX are facts about demand; a 7% fall on a beat is a fact about what was already in the price.