NEW YORK (CNN/Money) - General Electric Co., whose shares have underperformed this year's tumbling stock market, is getting set to brief investors Thursday on another quarter of solid earnings growth. And a nagging paradox remains.

In a sneak preview, the No. 1 company by market value Wednesday said third-quarter profit is on track to rise as much as 25 percent.

The brief statement pushed GE (GE: Research, Estimates) shares up $1.10, or 5 percent, to $27, narrowing their loss to 32.6 percent this year, a period when the Standard & Poor's 500 index is off 27 percent.

This gap between stock performance and earnings growth underscores a difficulty for GE, which has affirmed and reaffirmed expectations for double-digit growth this year only to face questions about how those numbers are managed.

How, investors ask, can a company keep growing earnings amid an economic recovery that's bumpy at best?

"GE appears poised to deliver solid gains," Nicholas Heymann, who covers the company for Prudential Financial, told clients Wednesday. At the same time, Heymann, who employer does no investment banking business, added that GE's businesses are anticipating a continued "tough economic environment."

Jeff Graff, an analyst at Victory Capital Management, which owns about 28 million GE shares, does not expect to hear details beyond the three months ending in September.

"I expect to get a little bit of color about how the quarter's going to look," Graff said. "About where the strength and weakness were in the (September) quarter."

GE, whose diverse products include light bulbs, home appliances, jet engines and medical equipment, also owns one of the world's leading financial services companies, GE Capital, as well as broadcaster NBC.

The company has repeatedly denied that it manipulates its profit growth.

"We manage our businesses, we don't manage earnings," GE spokesman Gary Sheffer said last week.

Victory's Graff expects that GE's power systems and aerospace units struggled in the quarter. But he foresees strength from medical systems and NBC.

In July, the Fairfield, Conn.-based company said it anticipates third-quarter revenue will increase 8 percent-to-10 percent from a year earlier and quarterly profit will rise 20 percent to 25 percent.

Analysts surveyed by First Call expect, on average, that earnings per share of 41 cents a share, up from 33 cents a year. The company reports detailed results next month.

J.P. Morgan this week trimmed its 2003 earnings-per-share estimate on GE to $1.70 per share from $1.76 per share due to a weaker outlook for a number of its units.

"We believe a combination of worse than planned fundamentals across the portfolio has further weakened the guidance cushion," J.P. Morgan said in a research note.

The reduction comes as a raft of blue chip companies, including Honeywell, McDonald's, and Tyco International, cut financial guidance.

GE this quarter also took a public relations hit. Former CEO Jack Welch last week gave up most of a controversial package of retirement benefits criticism that his perks were excessive. He valued the perks, including access to Red Sox tickets, corporate apartments and company jets, at as much as $2.5 million a year.

Still, the Securities and Exchange Commission is looking into the package, GE said, amid concerns about how the company released details of the agreement.

GE's problems mirror those of other 1990s highfliers that suffered as loft expectations go bust.

To that end, some of the expectations are being taken out of GE. But maybe not all of them. Analysts surveyed by First Call expect that GE's 2003 profits will rise to 8 percent to $1.78 per share, in what could be a tenth straight year of profit growth.