Comment by boulos | Hacker News Reader

Comment by boulos | Hacker News Reader

For those wondering “really, they had the Amazon earnings ahead of time and only made $1.4M?” this reminded me of a good Matt Levine writeup about a group of folks who obtained massive numbers of earnings reports ahead of time [1]. Having the clear knowledge of the earnings report doesn’t give you perfect knowledge on how to trade it / the reaction!

> Their performance is statistically significantly greater than that of random choice. However, the difference is economically small. For example, only 31% of earnings announcements traded by the informed traders fell within the tail deciles. About 70% of their informed trades missed the biggest stock price return opportunities. They traded earnings announcements with an average absolute return of 5.15%. The average earnings announcement return in the tail deciles is 11.3% (median 9.2%).

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/amp/opinion/articles/2019-11-26/kn...

Remember the recent Twitter attack, where malicious actors were able to post from many high-profile & verified accounts? The attackers could've done just about anything. Moved stocks. Start World War 3. And all they did was try a cryptocurrency scam that netted them $couple-thousand.

Well, that’s because it was literal children going after rare usernames who then pivoted to dumb crypto scams.

Which reading this complaint, sounds like the same dumb criminal mindset as these people.

Crypto scams are not dumb. The people that send are dumb. It is the easiest scam to pull off and I used to do it.

Post a page saying you double btc because you stole too much and people throw btc at you.

Matt Levine again: https://mobile.twitter.com/matt_levine/status/12835030809784... :)

Teenagers, theyre just dumb (until theyre not)

Right, stocks go down after earnings all the time, even when earnings are good, because investors want to capture some of that value. There is often a pop a day or so later, but it's not so simple to time.

And given the relatively low amounts we're talking about in this case, even a perfectly-timed trade not be as beneficial since it is going to likely be behind those who are making the same trade in larger volumes at the same time.

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