I first want to mention I have read some of your previous posts and find you very intelligent so thanks for continuing to answer my threads/questions. If I assume that the earnings moves are random then it does not matter about the fundamentals. If earnings are not random, then I will eventually find a model that predicts earnings moves and I will become a lot richer ALOT quicker.Fair point. But how do you know it’s supply and demand vs a real fundamental issue?
If you trade it systematically then the supply/demand return will be low as you will be forced to trade a lot of “pushes.”
I have also matched implied move with actual move, and many times over it fails to model the distribution appropriately. The reason I beleive it has not been arbed away is that for the less liquid companies there is a capacity constraint aswell the drawdowns could get intensive. Like you could put on 5 earnings trades in one day each at 3% of total fund value and lose on all 5.
Lastly I want to mention that humans have an auto correlation pattern(base there decisions on recent past). Look at WMT they have very small earnings moves , last 2 quarters had huge moves so this quarter the expected move was 4.5, the sd for WMT is just over a buck. Thats an easy sell and it was profitable. And if we were wrong and WMT moved a large amount say $8 the losses would have been small.
