Earnings Surprises; Historical EPS surprises

[rmerikle]

I am wondering if anyone out there can tell me a way to capture earning surprises in a commercially available program.

Ideally what I am looking to do is capture those companies that have very recently beat their expected EPs and also capture those companies that have historically beat their EPS projections.

There are a number of other filters that I want to put on the overall trading strategy and therefore want to find a way of automating it. What I am thinking is somehow tweaking or combining EPS growth constraints to get the information I am looking for....

Thanks a million in a advance

PS This is my first post to this group, so please excuse me if I have misposted or done some other inexcusable offense.

 

[maxpi]

You can look at individual stocks on yahoo finance and have a record of expectations and actual reported earnings for a few quarters, also briefing.com has a lot of material and a searchable database. When a surprise is reported the prices tend to move very fast, hard to trade it seems to me.

Max

 

[rmerikle]

Quote from maxpi:

When a surprise is reported the prices tend to move very fast, hard to trade it seems to me.

Most earnings are posted in the off trading hours, usually after the market closes. I agree prices do move quickly and this is why I am trying to figure out a way to capture this mechanically rather then manually. If I figure out a way to capture this mechanically then I can put other constraints within the same program.

Right now the only way I can see tackling this is to do the EPS research manually and then input those tickers into a secondary script. Ideally I would like to combine this into one script that I can run on a daily basis. It would save considerable manual research labor.

I would also like to somehow identify those stocks that have historically outperformed their EPS as compared to the market's expectations at the time of the release.