GE shares surge 10% after earnings top expectations
General Electric delivered fourth-quarter earnings on Wednesday that topped analyst expectations and gave a better-than-anticipated cash-flow forecast that signaled the troubled conglomerate could be turning around.

Shares of GE rose 10.3% in trading to close at $12.94. Up 51% in the past 12 months, the stock climbed to its highest level since October 2018.

"The fourth quarter marked a strong close to the year for GE. We met or exceeded our full-year financial targets and are on a positive trajectory for 2020," Chairman and CEO Larry Culp said in a statement.

Here's what GE reported versus what Wall Street expected:

EPS: 21 cents vs. 18 cents expected by analysts surveyed by Refnitiv.

Revenue: $26.24 billion vs. $25.57 billion expected by the Refnitiv survey.

GE's closely watched metric of industrial free cash flow came in at $2.3 billion for 2019, topping its own guidance of between $0 to $2 billion. FCF is a financial measure that's often used as a gauge of efficiency.

Bank of America upgraded GE to buy after its results, with analyst Andrew Obin saying he has "more confidence" in the company's ability to execute moving forward.

"The company has undergone a significant reinvestment cycle, positioning it well from a competitive standpoint. The improving FCF trajectory should be supportive for shares," Obin said.

JPMorgan analyst Stephen Tusa, widely considered the top industrials analyst, stuck by his firm's underweight rating after GE's results. He acknowledged that "the headlines are better than expected" but added the caveat that "there is a lot to unpack here."

"We don't see too much detachment from our view of on-the-ground fundamentals, which is what our call is based off of, having assumed the story was shifting from balance sheet to earnings when we downgraded last year," Tusa said. "It's hard to gauge whether '20 is an earlier-than-expected normalization or a step up in the bridge to a consensus number for '21."