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Comment by czhiddy | Hacker News Reader

Interesting how AMZN jumps 5% after missing earnings, yet GOOG drops nearly 10% with nearly the exact same results (increased hiring and expenses resulting in lower than expected profit).

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Stocks don't react to how results in announcements compare to last year, stocks react to how results in announcements compare with how Wall Street priced the stock yesterday based on their guess to what the results would be. Efficient markets 101 - otherwise you could make money by buying, one day in advance, stocks that obviously probably did well compared to last year. If this is not obvious to you then you should never invest in anything besides index funds (seriously, I've seen people do really badly by not understanding elementary implications of the inexploitable markets hypothesis).

Um, missing earnings means earnings was less than what the wall street analysts expected, it doesn't mean it was less than last year.

I thought it generally meant that it was less than the company's own predictions, not the analysts? In any event it shouldn't matter which estimate they're falling short of as long as it isn't the market's implicit estimate.

I think that is because investors believe in Jeff Bezos more as CEO than Larry Page. Bezos comes from Wall Street, so Wall Streeters probably have more confidence in him. Plus he has been CEO for a long time, whereas Page comes from academia and just started the role (again).

I think it's really silly to try to draw out any meaning, or even assume any meaning exists in the first place, in single-day movements or reactions like these. What happens in a few hours of trading after earnings announcements means nothing after a few days.

Simple:

"Google made a 10% across-the-board salary increase, which is driving up expenses this year."

"[Amazon] spent ferociously to build more fulfillment centers and expand its technology offerings."

As a general rule, short term movements on Wall Street are "dumb" because there's a lot of emotion driving trading on that scale, plus lots of weird automated/hedge fund trading going on. To give just one example of something that probably contributes to noise: naive trading programs that see an uptick on "Hathaway" in the news streams, assume that's a signal indicating some new item about Buffet's company, so they buy up BH -- but in reality the spike was caused by a wave of news about the actress Anne Hathaway. I'm sure there's a lot of dumb/naive algorithms like that out there. Plus who knows how many pre-scheduled trades or triggered trades. In the short term, lots of dumb noise and froth. I think overall movements on Wall Street are the most meaningful and valid in the longer term, and across a large class of things.

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