Describes a rumored earnings number about a company before the formal declaration of earnings comes out.
Additional meaning of Whisper Number:
Whisper numbers are the unofficial and unpublished earnings per share (EPS) forecasts that circulate among professionals on Wall Street... generally reserved for the favored (wealthy) clients of a brokerage.
Because the whisper number is the analysts’ true expectation, it tends to be more accurate than the officially published consensus estimates. The Wall Street Journal found one website that gathers whisper numbers from research analysts[3] and a Bloomberg News study found these same numbers to miss actual reported earnings by 21% while the officially published consensus earnings estimates missed actual results by an average of 44%[4]. Furthermore, a joint study by the universities of Michigan, Indiana, and Purdue also found that whisper numbers were more effective at predicting actual earnings results than the consensus earnings estimates.