Good morning! 

An incredible earnings season — with at least one catch:

There's a phenomenon in sports where a pundit will say, "They would have won if there were just two more minutes on the clock," or "if there were only two more laps," or other hypotheticals that aim to illustrate the importance of whatever almost happened.

Sometimes this is important! If mere good luck prevented an accident, the hypothetical should be addressed and corrected.

The S&P 500's earnings season is, so far, the best in 20 years. Money is raining in the aggregate. There's some good breadth too.

But as Goldman Sachs, FactSet, and others have pointed out, take away Alphabet and Amazon, and earnings growth, while still good, comes back down to earth.

A few heavy hitters are skewing the averages.

But as Rafael Nadal famously said when asked about how good Nick Kyrgios would be if he worked harder, "If, if, if. Doesn't exist."

This is especially true for everyone invested in $VOO, $SPY, $IVV, or whatever S&P 500 ETF or index fund their 401(k) offers. They own Google. They own Amazon. The money's real, at least for now.

Still, respecting the Google and Amazon "if" is still important for understanding the market.

The other catch, as our Jared Blikre put it, is the fact that Wall Street may have seen these earnings so far this season, nodded, and said "OK" in the same weird human way that we agonize over losses and nod at our wins.

As he wrote, "Wall Street may already be treating great earnings as the new floor" as earnings revisions are suddenly often toward the upside. Guidance is shooting upwards.

That may be fine. But it doesn't take a market genius to understand that high expectations also carry the potential for high disappointment.