irrational markets

Duck Season! Rabbit Season! Earnings Season!
photo shows a few ducks flying through a gray sky, tall grasses in the foreground

Maybe you’ve seen the classic cartoon that goes like this: Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck, chased by the hunter Emler Fudd, start arguing over which animal Elmer is supposed to be hunting.

“Duck season!” Bugs yells.

“Rabbit season!” Daffy insists. And they continue back and forth until Bugs cleverly switches his response to “Rabbit season!” At this point Daffy Duck counters with the only logical response… “Duck season!”

And Elmer promptly shoots his foolish prey.

There is another, equally confounding (and sometimes comical season) you may have heard about: “Earnings season!”

Every company that issues publicly-traded stock is required by law to report about its financial wellbeing to investors and regulators, once every quarter. While every company has its own fiscal calendar and different companies report at different times, most companies stick to straightforward calendar quarters so major earnings reports tend to bunch together every three months.

In theory, the effects of this should be simple for investors: a company that posts a good performance should logically see stock gains, and a company that posts a poor performance should see stock losses.

But investors tend to view earnings reports through the lens of their expectations. A company that does well might be seen as a disappointment by investors who expected even better from it. And even when a company beats consensus expectations, some investors may second-guess the consensus and bet on an even bigger blowout.

All of this is to say that earnings season can be a very volatile time. Stock prices often swing wildly up and down in response to earnings reports, often in ways that are confusing or counterintuitive. If you listen to market commentary you may hear many different (often contradictory) explanations for why a company dropped on seemingly good earnings or rose on seemingly bad earnings.

It is a confusing experience, and trying to make sense of stock moves during earnings season might make you sympathize with Elmer Fudd.

While it can be alarming to witness stocks jump like this in the middle of earnings season, over the long run, much of that volatility will be forgotten. Ten years from now, do you think you will remember what one of your stock holdings did in response to one earnings report many years ago? The big investment news stories worth remembering will be about bigger news than a quarterly earnings report.

We already know stock investing involves volatility—and some of it comes around like clockwork every three months. Clients, if you are ever wondering about sudden market moves, give us a call before anybody goes daffy.

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Play the audio version of this post below:

Duck Season! Rabbit Season! Earnings Season! – 228Main.com Presents: The Best of Leibman Financial Services

This text can be found at https://www.228Main.com/.

Two Economists

© Can Stock Photo / skaron

The story goes like this. Two economists are walking down the street. One says, “Look! A $20 bill, just lying there!” and reaches to pick it up. The other says, “You fool! If that was really a $20 bill, somebody would have picked it up already.”

The underpinnings of this joke might be what is called the Efficient Markets Hypothesis, or EMH. It holds that all available information is already in the price of every security, so it is not possible to ‘beat the market.’ Related notions include the idea that investment selection does not matter, only the asset class or investment allocation.

Of course, our experience tells us that at times, certain investments do get mispriced. Condos in Las Vegas in 2007, tech stocks during the dot-com era, oil at $140 per barrel in 2008: all of these things seem to be examples of when the market was not efficient at all.

At these times, consensus expectations drifted far from the unfolding reality. “You can’t lose money in real estate” and “We’re in a new era, tech stock valuations don’t matter” and “Oil will never trade below $100 again” were the refrains of those faulty expectations. You may remember them.

Of course, we believe that the crowd can be wrong. That space between consensus expectations and the unfolding reality is where profit potential lives. One of our jobs is to try to find those exploitable anomalies and invest in them. Another is to go against the crowd when we believe it is wrong.

The simple rule, ‘never join a stampede in the markets,’ is one way we express this.

As a consequence, looking at the world with our own eyes, doing our own research, finding our own conclusions, this is what we do at 228 Main. It takes some courage to go against the crowd, to take unpopular actions, to stick with our strategies even when they require more patience than we had planned on. You and we are in this together: without your persistence, we could not do what we do over the long haul.

Hopefully from time to time we will find those $20 bills that others do not believe in.

Clients, if you would like to talk about this or anything else, please email us or call.

Content in this material is for general information only and not intended to provide specific advice or recommendations for any individual. All performance referenced is historical and is no guarantee of future results.

All investing involves risk including loss of principal. No strategy assures success or protects against loss.