Why settle for ordinary quarterly reports?

I believe that the biggest factor in a stock's ability to beat the market is its ability to beat the market's expectations. That's why I look every week at three companies that have humbled Wall Street's pros over the past few trading days. If a company has more in the tank than the analysts figured, capital appreciation often follows.

We can start with Sirius XM Radio (Nasdaq: SIRI). The satellite-radio provider delivered its first profitable quarter. Net income rounded out to merely breakeven results, but that's still comfortably ahead of Wall Street's target of a $0.02 a share loss.

salesforce.com (NYSE: CRM) was another winner, narrowly basting the pros with its $0.16-per-share quarterly profit to wrap up its fiscal year. The company's fiscal year may have seemed tight and steady on the bottom line -- with per-share profits clocking in between $0.15 and $0.17 in each of the four quarters -- but Wall Street is banking on net income to nearly double this new fiscal year.

salesforce.com delivers cost-effective enterprise software solutions through cloud computing. Storing client data and running the apps on its servers provides portability and attractive price points. It's no wonder that the fastest-growing segment for webhosting giant Rackspace (NYSE: RAX) is hosting third-party apps on its cloud platform.

Finally, we have DreamWorks Animation (NYSE: DWA) coloring in nicely. The computer-animation studio earned $0.50 a share in its latest quarter, blowing away guesstimates of $0.37 a share. With a fresh slate of films that will be available on premium 3-D and IMAX (Nasdaq: IMAX), DreamWorks Animation has done well since taking the baton from Disney's (NYSE: DIS) Pixar to be the largest stand-alone computer animation studio.

Keep watching the companies that surpass expectations. Over time, doing so will be a rewarding experience for investors, as the market rewards the overachievers. That's the kind of surprise we look for in the Rule Breakers newsletter service. Want in? Check out a 30-day trial subscription.

Either way, come back next Monday to learn about more stocks that blew the market away.