Carnival Earnings Anxiety: The Good, Bad, and Ugly

2 hours ago 3

Rick Munarriz, The Motley Fool

Wed, March 18, 2026 astatine 9:27 AM CDT 5 min read

The world's largest cruise enactment relation by gross is pulling into port, financially speaking, adjacent week. Carnival Corp. (NYSE: CCL) volition denote its fiscal first-quarter results connected Friday morning, March 29. There's a batch riding connected the report.

Carnival banal has been volatile, but it has fared good for investors who person held done the ups and downs. The banal is coasting past the market, up 25% implicit the past year. The shares person astir tripled implicit the past 3 years.

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Zoom successful a small closer, and the banal chart's not precisely a pleasance cruise. The shares are down 20% implicit the past six months, sliding 18% successful 2026. With Carnival shares apt connected the determination by the extremity of adjacent week, let's instrumentality a look astatine the good, the bad, and the disfigured heading into the cruising bellwether's telltale captious show update.

Two radical   connected  a vessel  raising glasses successful  a toast.

Image source: Getty Images.

Carnival banal investors person a bully crushed to expect a blowout bottom-line show adjacent week. Analysts spot the cruiser earning $0.18 a stock for the fiscal 4th that ended past month. This is good up of the $0.13 a stock it posted a twelvemonth earlier.

There are 2 bully reasons to expect a beat. The biggest crushed is that it's precisely what Carnival has done consistently implicit the past 3 years. Let's look backmost connected the past 10 fiscal quarters, comparing marketplace expectations to reality.

Period

EPS Estimate

Actual EPS

Surprise

Fiscal Q3 2023

$0.75

$0.86

15%

Fiscal Q4 2023

($0.13)

($0.07)

46%

Fiscal Q1 2024

($0.18)

($0.14)

22%

Fiscal Q2 2024

($0.02)

$0.11

650%

Fiscal Q3 2024

$1.15

$1.27

10%

Fiscal Q4 2024

$0.07

$0.14

94%

Fiscal Q1 2025

$0.02

$0.13

485%

Fiscal Q2 2025

$0.35

$0.24

46%

Fiscal Q3 2025

$1.32

$1.43

9%

Fiscal Q4 2025

$0.25

$0.34

39%

Data source: Yahoo! Finance. EPS = net per stock (adjusted).

Carnival isn't conscionable beating the estimates. It has landed astatine slightest 9% up of those nett targets. No winning streak lasts forever, but the likelihood look to beryllium successful the cruise vessel operator's favour until it proves mortal.

The 2nd crushed to clasp retired for a bushed is that it's precisely what its peers person been doing since Carnival's past report. They run connected a antithetic fiscal calendar than Carnival. The lone overlap successful their reports would beryllium the period of December. The inclination inactive favors the industry's bully fortune.

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