“Let’s make a bet,” my 6-year-old son said to me when I picked him up from school the other day. “I bet we get home at 2:56. If we get home then, you owe me $10!”

“Sure,” I said. “But you owe me $10 if you’re wrong.”

Seeing as I had control of the wheel, I figured it was a bet worth making just to prove a point — don’t gamble, and never bet money on something the other person is in control of.

At the end of the bet, another life lesson came into the picture — the different interpretations of what exactly defined the bet. That brings me to the issue at hand today.

So let’s make a bet, just to prove a point: I’ll bet you $10 that we entered an earnings recession back in April when our investment director, Jeff Opdyke, pointed it out. You can take the other side of that bet, and say we are not yet in an earnings recession.

The truth is an argument could be made for both sides of this bet. Officially, an earnings recession is two consecutive quarters of falling corporate earnings. However, there are many different ways to define what corporate earnings are.

You could look at net income, operating profits, earnings per share or adjusted earnings per share. Either one could technically define an earnings recession, which is why we could both be wrong in our current bet, or we are both right, depending on how you look at it.

This is what I mean by interpretations.

Maybe you have a lot of confidence in corporate America and trust their adjusted earnings to be a true reflection of the current situation. Maybe I focus on profits they’re actually generating by looking at operating profits, which went into a recession earlier this year.

No matter how you look at it now, an earnings recession in even the broadest sense is becoming a reality, and that means trouble may be just ahead … as well as opportunities to profit.

The Fed’s Battle Not to Kill the Market