Fear and Greed: A Returns-Based Trading Strategy around Earnings Announcements

Abstract

This article documents that earnings announcements serve as a reality check on short-term, fear- and greed-driven price development. Stocks with extreme abnormal returns in the week before an earnings announcement experience strong price reversals around the announcement. Basedon the findings of the authors, a trading strategy that exploits this reversal would have been profitable in 40 of the last 42 years and earned abnormal returns in excess of 1.3% over a two day-window.