The wave of earnings reports due in the next few weeks is expected to herald a seismic shift in corporate fortunes.
With oil prices plunging, Wall Street is betting that the long profit boom in the energy sector is over. Now, investors are looking to industries such as technology and healthcare to emerge as earnings growth leaders.
The stakes are high, because without exciting profit growth somewhere, investors could decide that the stock market's bull run is on its last legs.
The Dow Jones industrials edged up to another record high Tuesday amid a smattering of earnings announcements. The bulk of the reports will flow out in the next three weeks.
With the surge in crude oil prices since 2003, energy has been a driving force behind the record streak of profit expansion for the blue-chip Standard & Poor's 500 stock index.
Through the third quarter, total operating earnings of S&P 500 companies rose at a double-digit percentage rate for 18 consecutive quarters, S&P data show.
But the steep slide in oil since July is expected to pull down the energy sector's results in the fourth quarter. As a group, energy companies in the S&P 500 are expected to post a 5% decline in earnings compared with a year earlier, S&P estimates.
That would be the first year-over-year drop in energy earnings since the third quarter of 2002, said Howard Silverblatt, who tracks earnings at S&P.
Chevron Corp. last week warned that its fourth-quarter results would be "adversely affected" by lower crude prices and other issues.
What's bad for energy companies is good for oil consumers, of course. Retail sales in December beat expectations, and that could boost fourth-quarter earnings at retailers and other consumer-dependent firms.
"Retailers had a good year overall," thanks in part to the pullback in energy prices, said Ashwani Kaul, senior analyst at earnings tracker Reuters Estimates in New York.
Lower energy prices also could bolster earnings of chemical companies that use oil as a feedstock. Within the S&P 500 index, the basic materials sector -- which includes chemical companies -- is expected to report a 36% year-over-year gain in fourth-quarter operating earnings, according to S&P data.
For the S&P 500 as a whole, strong fourth-quarter earnings growth in the basic materials, telecommunications and financial services sectors is expected to help offset declines in energy, utilities and home building.
