Earnings news and small traders

Soft Information in Earnings Announcements: News or Noise?

This paper examines whether the “soft” information contained in the text of management’s quarterly earnings press releases is incrementally informative over the company’s reported “hard” earnings news. We use Diction, a textual-analysis program, to extract various dimensions of managerial net optimism from more than 20,000 corporate earnings announcements over the period 1998 to 2006 and docume...

Deviation from Target Leverage and Leverage Adjustment Speed in Firms with Small Positive Earnings

This study investigates whether deviation from target leverage (leverage adjustment speed) in firms with small positive earnings (i.e., SPOS) is higher (slower) than that of other firms. We find evidence suggesting that managers of SPOS manipulate sales, production processes, and discretionary expenses to avoid reporting losses. Our results show that deviation from target leverage in SPOS is hi...

Small Trader Reactions to Consecutive Earnings Surprises

This paper tests whether traders react more strongly as a series of similar earnings surprises continues, as predicted by several important behavioral finance models. We compile measures of buying and selling from NYSE TAQ data for a large ten-year sample. Results show strong, consistent, evidence that small traders exhibit an increasing reaction – with significant increases in reaction strengt...

Consecutive Earnings Surprises: Small and Large Trader Reactions

Prior research demonstrates that investors respond differently to earnings surprises that are part of a string of consecutive earnings increases or surprises than to those that are not. To shed light on who values these patterns, I compare trading responses of small and large traders to earnings surprises that occur during a series of positive or negative surprises. I find that the relative int...

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