[chollida1]

I wrote this a few years ago about trying to predict earnings movements from stocks from about 10 years ago.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9353569#9356652

It turns out the best I could do at the time was to rank the analysts and weight their preditions by their ranking.

It actually worked well for a few years, which is a lifetime for a trading strategy.

Sadly earnings movements have gotten a lot harder to trade on.

[apaprocki]

May or may not be related, but a number of years ago (< 10) Bloomberg started ranking analysts based on performance and that info is available on the ANR screen. Prior to that you had to do itself. So at some point that reference info was made easily available.

[dsacco]

> Sadly earnings announcements have gotten a lot harder to trade on.

They're absolutely more difficult for reversion strategies, but if you're armed with more granular data of a high enough signal specific to the company you can do targeted trades very successfully.

Accurately forecasting the earnings results ahead of time on a per-equity basis requires more setup and data processing, but it is close to infallible when it comes to profiting on outperforms. Collect ultra-specified "alternative" data on individual companies with optimistic or pessimistic analyst forecasts, analyze it, then take a contrarian position if the data predicts an unexpected earnings result. This fails is in the case of extremely uninformed sentiment in the opposite direction of your own position (likely by unsophisticated investors not interpreting the results "correctly" en masse and opting for hype instead). But you can establish a win rate with a positive cushion.

One of the interesting things I've also done is collecting this data and using it beyond discretionary earnings trades. For example, by selling option premium for equities with very high theta, conversely stable revenue as forecasted by the data and low overall sentiment activity in the market. This is harder to pull off but it allows you to conduct a greater number of trades on a rolling basis through the quarter.

[inglor]

Can confirm from my time at TipRanks that this data was useful for trading strategies.