The heaviest earnings week of the first-quarter season opens Tuesday. Tesla reports after the close Wednesday, April 22; Philip Morris, AT&T, IBM and Boeing also report Wednesday. Thursday stacks Intel, American Express, Gilead, ServiceNow and Blackstone. UnitedHealth Group reports Wednesday. [1] Intel's call is set for 2 p.m. Pacific on Wednesday. [2] IBM's is at 5 p.m. Eastern the same day. [3]

Corporate earnings are running ahead of expectations. The S&P 500 is on track for a sixth straight quarter of double-digit earnings growth — Q1 is expected up 14 percent — even as the index digests the war premium in oil and the new shape of the Iran blockade. [1] Options markets are pricing a Tesla implied move of 8.19 percent on earnings and 8.52 percent on Intel, both above their trailing one-year averages. [1]

Tesla is the single most-anticipated report of the week and the first from the company since the Dallas and Houston driverless-taxi rollout the paper covered Saturday. Closing price Friday was $400.62, up 3 percent on the day; consensus is $0.39 EPS on expected revenue of $22.96 billion, a metric that does not capture the robotaxi unit directly. [4] The stock has spent most of the month re-rating on the back of that rollout rather than on any fundamentals disclosed to date.

The week also runs against CAPE portal opening Monday and SpaceX analyst day Tuesday. Industrials, mega-tech, health care, finance and consumer staples all print earnings inside 72 hours. [1] What the tape shows by Friday will be a broad read on whether corporate America is still compounding at its 2025 pace, or whether the geopolitical premium has reached the income statement.

-- THEO KAPLAN, San Francisco