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undefined | Earnings season kicks off next week. Morgan Stanley sees these stocks surprising to the upside

Earnings season begins next week, and investors will soon shift their attention to corporate results for the first quarter that ended March 31. In a Friday note, Morgan Stanley’s quantitative equity research team identified three companies—Western Digital, Citigroup and RTX—as the most likely to post earnings surprises to the upside, outpacing Wall Street consensus estimates.

Western Digital tops the list with a 96th‑percentile score in Morgan Stanley’s Earnings Surprise Composite model, driven by a tight memory‑storage‑chip market tied to the AI build‑out. The stock has surged nearly 900 % over the past year and climbed 77 % so far in 2026. The company is slated to release its quarterly results on April 23; analysts expect earnings of $2.36 per share on revenue of $3.23 billion, following a prior beat that briefly sent the shares down more than 10 % before a 16 % rebound.

Citigroup ranks in the 93rd percentile, having rallied 158 % (excluding reinvested dividends) over the past three years, though its price remains relatively flat in 2026. For the April 14 earnings release, FactSet forecasts $2.67 per share on $23.34 billion of revenue. RTX, the defense contractor behind Pratt & Whitney, Raytheon and Collins Aerospace, lands in the 81st percentile. After an initial rise at the start of the U.S.–Iran conflict, the stock is now slightly lower; analysts project $1.50 per share on $21.39 billion of revenue for its April 21 filing.