Standardized Earnings Surprise

If you are a serious investor or finance professional, knowing and being able to interpret the various types of SEC filings will help you in making informed investment decisions. Discounted cash flow is a valuation method used to estimate the attractiveness of an investment opportunity. Excel Shortcuts PC Mac List of Excel Shortcuts Excel shortcuts – It may seem slower at first if you’re used to the mouse, but it’s worth the investment to take the time and… A company’s SUE score has nothing to do with the courtroom success of its lawyers. ☆The financial support of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange and the North Carolina Institute for Investments Research is gratefully acknowledged.

While underreaction defines a slow adjustment of prices to corporate events or announcements, overreaction deals with extreme stock price reactions to previous information or past performance. Theoretical models have shown that both phenomena find potential explanations in cognitive biases, that is, investor irrationality. He says companies with SUEs above +1.0 in each of the last two quarters, plus upward revisions over the last 90 days in analysts’ fourth-quarter estimates, are candidates to post more good news this time around. Earnings surprises, both good and bad, “are like cockroaches–you hardly ever get just one,” Abbott adds. This tracking behavior has powerful implications for their portfolio choice and its information content. An institution that downloaded an insider trading filing by a given firm last quarter increases its likelihood of downloading an insider trading filing on the same firm by more than 41.3 percentage points this quarter. Moreover, the average tracked stock that an institution buys generates annualized alphas of over 12% relative to the purchase of an average non tracked stock.

It is possible that trading on past SUE wont be effective when the previous quarters SUE is no longer strongly correlated with the subsequent quarters SUE in the future. Expected earnings, as the name suggests, are the earnings a company is anticipated to generate. The figure is determined by market analysts who study the company’s historical earnings. They also consider the state of the overall market and how it has been, and is currently, responding to the company. THE PURPOSE of this paper is to describe the results of an extensive empirical investigation of the relationship of earnings/price and earnings change ratios to subsequent stock price performance. The financial analysis of companies is essentially undertaken with the aim to assess their performance in light of their objectives and strategies …

Standardized Unexpected Earnings

Energy-services provider McDermott International Inc., for example, smashed analysts’ estimates with its quarterly results issued Oct. 30. But investors shrugged, because the outlook for its industry has deteriorated. Shares of gold-mining company Placer Dome Inc. have also languished despite recent upside surprises. But the accompanying list of high SUE scorers also includes such strong growth companies as Gap and America Online Inc. Their stocks have been fueled in part by their positive earnings surprises over the last year. Behavioral Finance aims to explain empirical anomalies by introducing investor psychology as a determinant of asset pricing. Two kinds of anomalies, namely underreaction and overreaction, have been established by an impressive record of empirical work.

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Another related approach – Standardised Unexpected Earnings – is to divide it by the standard deviation of earnings surprises measured over some historic period (e.g the previous 10 years). For example, Cisco was once said to consistently beat earnings estimates by a penny. Analysts spend an enormous amount of time before companies’ reporting their results, trying to predict earnings per share and other metrics.

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Scaled Earnings Surprise is a means of comparing the level of earnings surprise to the amount of disagreement between various analysts (since a wide range of expectations has different implications for what is “unexpected”). DCF analyses use future free cash flow projections and discount them via a required annual rate. If the value arrived at through the DCF is higher than the current cost of the investment, the opportunity could be a good one. Companies also release guidance to help analysts make accurate estimates, however, sometimes unexpected news or product demand will change the final outcome. Thus, SUE scores tend to discount surprises from companies with minuscule earnings, those covered by few analysts or those with forecasts all over the map. The best scores are earned by companies that have hefty earnings and beat forecasts clustered within a tight range. In other words, the amount of unexpected earnings is scaled by a measure of the size of historical forecast errors.

This study, using a very large sample of stocks and daily returns, represents the most complete and detailed analysis of quarterly earnings reports that has been performed to date. Our results are contrary to those of Reinganum and show that abnormal returns could have been earned almost any time during the 1970’s.

Sue Quarter

Our evidence largely rules out explanations based on flow and limits-of-arbitrage, but is more consistent with agency-induced preferences for stock characteristics that relate to poor long-run performance. In order tocreate an accurate forecastof how a specific company’s stock will perform, an analyst must gather information from several sources.

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A Review Of The Post

Earnings surprise occurs when the firms reported earnings per share deviates from the street estimate or the analysts consensus forecast. The unexpected earnings have been found to be useful in predicting abnormal stock returns. The investment implications of the size and sign of the unexpected earnings in global equity markets are well addressed in recent years. For example, Sultan finds that the unexpected earnings can be used as a discriminator between stocks that performed relatively well and stocks that performed relative poorly in Japan. Brown and Jeong show that an earnings surprise predictor is effective in selecting stocks from S&P 500 firms. Dische and Zimmermann report that abnormal returns can be earned from the portfolio of the Swiss stocks exhibiting the most positive earnings revision. Conroy, Eades and Harris find that stock prices are significantly affected by earnings surprises in Japan.

• Theoretical models have shown that both phenomena find potential explanations in cognitive biases, that is, investor irrationality.
• Theres no earnings surprise when SUE equals zero; the actual earnings per share is in line with the consensus earnings estimate.
• While there is evidence for a number of different factors, an all-encompassing explanation remains out of sight.
• Terminal value determines the value of a business or project beyond the forecast period when future cash flows can be estimated.
• Then it investigates if the strategy worked better for firms followed by fewer, rather than more financial analysts.
• This paper first examines if a trading strategy on the basis of earnings surprises worked in the U.S. tech sector.
• That is, the price does not immediately reflect the new information completely.

Terminal value determines the value of a business or project beyond the forecast period when future cash flows can be estimated. An earning surprise occurs when a company reports figures that are drastically different from Wall Street estimates. Management’s discussion and analysis dig into specific reasons behind aspects of company growth or decline on the income statement, balance sheet, and statement of cash flows.

Sue In Q And Sue In Q+1

The focus is on the U.S. technology sector as it has attracted significant public interest in recent years. This paper first examines if a trading strategy on the basis of earnings surprises worked in the U.S. tech sector.

Forecasting price/earnings can be tricky, which means that unexpected earnings may be the result of inaccurate analyst estimates. However, when unexpected earnings – positive or negative – are the direct result of the company’s actions, they may offer important insights to investors about the future trajectory of the company’s stock. Our results differ from numerous studies documenting a positive relation between institutional demand and future returns. However, the relation turns strongly negative at the one-year horizon used in anomaly studies. We consider several explanations for institutions’ tendency to trade contrary to anomaly prescriptions.

Many analysts use forecasting models, management guidance, and additional fundamental information to derive an EPS estimate. Publicly traded companies also issue their own guidance outlining expected future profits or losses. This forecast helps financial analysts set expectations, and can be compared to get a better idea of potential company performance in the upcoming quarter.

Mozes shows that the strategy of buying stocks on the basis of positive forecasted earnings surprises is more profitable for value firms than for growth firms. Bird, McElwee and McKinnon provide insights into how to identify investment opportunities based on earnings surprises and highlight the extent to which the opportunities differ across countries. Hsu demonstrates that it is profitable to take a long position in the portfolios with the highest earnings surprises and a short position in the portfolios with the lowest earnings surprises in the Asia/Pacific equity market. Levis and Liodakis conclude that positive and negative earnings surprises have an asymmetrical effect on the returns of low- and high-rated stocks in the U.K. The objective of this study is to contribute to the literature by adding this missing piece.

• Analysts spend an enormous amount of time before companies’ reporting their results, trying to predict earnings per share and other metrics.
• Equity strategist Joseph J. Abbott of earnings tracker IBES Inc. says these companies could be candidates to post an earnings surprise this reporting season, based on recent quarterly results and analysts’ revisions for the latest quarter.
• An earnings announcement is an official public statement of a company’s profitability for a specific time period, typically a quarter or a year.
• However, when unexpected earnings – positive or negative – are the direct result of the company’s actions, they may offer important insights to investors about the future trajectory of the company’s stock.
• Numerous studies have investigated the drift’s origins and properties, covering drivers such as insufficient risk adjustment of returns, trading frictions, or behavioral explanations.
• If the value arrived at through the DCF is higher than the current cost of the investment, the opportunity could be a good one.

We find that institutional managers tend to track top executives and to share educational and locational commonalities with the specific insiders they choose to follow. Collectively, our results suggest that the information in tracked trades is important for fundamental firm value and is only revealed following the information-rich dual trading by insiders and linked institutions.

It describes the drift of a firm’s stock price in the direction of the firm’s earnings surprise for an extended period of time. Contrary to what the efficient market hypothesis predicts, an earnings surprise does not lead to a full, instantaneous adjustment of stock prices, but to a slow, predictable drift. Numerous studies have investigated the drift’s origins and properties, covering drivers such as insufficient risk adjustment of returns, trading frictions, or behavioral explanations.

Similarly, stocks with negative earnings surprises tend to drift downward after the announcement. This strategy exploits the observed phenomenon that the stock price tends to drift in the days after the earnings announcement. A strategy that buys stocks with a positive surprise and sells stocks with a negative surprise generally generates alpha.

Likewise, firms with SUE scores of -1.0 or below in the last two quarters, plus downward revisions in the last three months, are considered good bets to post negative surprises when they next report. We survey the theory and evidence of behavioral corporate finance, which generally takes one of two approaches. The market timing and catering approach views managerial financing and investment decisions as rational managerial responses to securities mispricing. The managerial biases approach studies the direct effects of managers’ biases and nonstandard preferences on their decisions. We review relevant psychology, economic theory and predictions, empirical challenges, empirical evidence, new directions such as behavioral signaling, and open questions. Analysts rely on a variety of fundamental factors in the companies’ SEC filings (e.g., SEC Form 10-Q for a quarterly report and SEC Form 10-K for its more comprehensive annual report). Unexpected earnings are an important component in the accounting/financial industry because of their potential significance for investors.

U.S. stocks have been shown to earn higher returns during earnings announcement months than during non-announcement months. Of the 20 countries with enough data to conduct a within-country analysis, nine exhibit a significantly positive premium. An earnings surprise occurs when a company’s reported quarterly or annual profits are above or below analysts’ expectations. SUE measures the earnings surprise in terms of the number of standard deviation above or below the consensus earnings estimate. The absolute value of SUE measures the degree of unexpected earnings and the sign of SUE indicates whether the unexpected earnings are above or below the consensus estimate. That is, the greater the positive SUE the greater the earnings surprise above the earnings estimate while the smaller the negative SUE the greater the earnings surprise below the earnings estimate. Theres no earnings surprise when SUE equals zero; the actual earnings per share is in line with the consensus earnings estimate.

The “surprise” aspect of the earnings means that the price of a stock can spike up or fall dramatically over the course of a single day. This is calculated by dividing the percentage earnings surprise by the standard deviation of analyst earnings forecasts. An earnings announcement is an official public statement of a company’s profitability for a specific time period, typically a quarter or a year. A positive surprise will often lead to a sharp increase in the company’s stock price, while a negative surprise to a rapid decline. Finally, the study suggests that trading on the basis of previous quarters SUE is profitable as it is directly correlated with the SUE in the subsequent quarter.

• Earnings surprises, both good and bad, “are like cockroaches–you hardly ever get just one,” Abbott adds.
• U.S. stocks have been shown to earn higher returns during earnings announcement months than during non-announcement months.
• The market timing and catering approach views managerial financing and investment decisions as rational managerial responses to securities mispricing.
• The Structured Query Language comprises several different data types that allow it to store different types of information…
• Our analysis also indicates that risk adjustments matter little in this type of work.
• Thus, SUE scores tend to discount surprises from companies with minuscule earnings, those covered by few analysts or those with forecasts all over the map.
• A company’s SUE score has nothing to do with the courtroom success of its lawyers.

They need to speak with the company’s management, visit that company, study its products and closely watch the industry in which it operates. Then, the analyst will create a mathematical model that incorporates what the analyst has learned and reflects their judgment or expectation of that company’s earnings for the forthcoming quarter. The expectations may be published by the company on its website, and will be distributed to the analyst’s clients. A surprise occurs when a company reports numbers that deviate from those estimates. Microsoft Corp., which clobbered analysts’ earnings estimates on Tuesday, exemplifies the SUE system. The company’s last two quarterly SUE scores were very high at 7.8 and 2.6, and analysts’ mean forecast for the fourth quarter had been upgraded about 14% over the last three months. They use the models to forecast what the company can reasonably expect to generate in earnings during the upcoming accounting period.

The smaller the historical size of forecast errors, the more meaningful a specific size of EPS forecast errors, and vice versa. Chip Stapleton is a Series 7 and Series 66 license holder, CFA Level 1 exam holder, and currently holds a Life, Accident, and Health License in Indiana. He has 8 years experience in finance, from financial planning and wealth management to corporate finance and FP&A.

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Our analysis also indicates that risk adjustments matter little in this type of work. Finally, we find that roughly 50% of the adjustment of stock returns to unexpected quarterly earnings occurs over a 90-day period after the earnings are announced. The “Post-Earnings-Announcement Drift” refers to an anomaly in financial markets.