Three High-attention Earnings Announcement Clusters Drive Market?

Does the U.S. stock market respond predictably to simultaneous earnings announcements of attention-grabbing companies? In their September 2020 paper entitled “Famous Firms, Earnings Clusters, and the Stock Market”, Yixin Chen, Randolph Cohen and Zixuan Wang examine U.S. stock market (E-mini S&P 500 futures) responses to earnings announcement clusters (EAC) comprised of high-attention firms. They focus on the three most prominent pre-open (AM) and three most prominent post-close (PM) EACs in each of January, April, July and October, with each announcement weighted for prominence by associated total number of Dow Jones earnings news articles during the prior calendar year. Using earnings announcements and daily prices for S&P 500 components and minute-by-minute E-mini S&P 500 futures returns during 1999-2018, and associated earnings news articles during 1998-2018, they find that: (more…)