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Too Good to be True? An Analysis of the Options Market's Reactions to Earnings Releases
Author(s) -
Lu Yan,
Ray Sugata
Publication year - 2016
Publication title -
journal of business finance and accounting
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.282
H-Index - 77
eISSN - 1468-5957
pISSN - 0306-686X
DOI - 10.1111/jbfa.12214
Subject(s) - earnings , economics , post earnings announcement drift , skepticism , econometrics , financial economics , stock (firearms) , earnings response coefficient , monetary economics , actuarial science , accounting , mechanical engineering , philosophy , epistemology , engineering
Using option implied risk neutral return distributions before and after earnings announcements, we study the option market's reaction to extreme events over earnings announcements. While earnings announcements generally reduce short‐term uncertainty about the stock price, very good news does not reduce uncertainty and slightly bad news actually increases uncertainty. We also find that left tail probabilities decrease over earnings releases while right tail probabilities increase. We interpret these findings as evidence of maintained investor expectations that very good news is generally not released during earnings announcements, combined with skepticism in the form of lingering uncertainty at the release of such very good news.