re: Playing Intraday Analyst Meeting Reactions
Ramsey,
Yes you're right about that... reg FD sure has changed the equation for investors and traders... mostly favorably. We often play earnings reactions by watching the street react to statements made on conference calls after an earnings report. These reactions tend to be stronger now that management teams can't legally "pre-leak" before the call. For many of the big-cap stocks like CSCO, INTC, MSFT, ORCL, SUNW etc. you can literally see the waves of buying/selling hitting (in the aftermarket) during the call as the emotions run high and low. Aftermarket trading is often thin, and buying/selling occurs in reaction to various statements made during the call.
With HWP, they usually shy away from making any big surprise statements during the meeting with analysts (which just started), since they have a history/culture of floating trial balloons earlier, but maybe they'll break that trend today. We would normally probably skip playing that event since they tend to be reserved... we like to play companies that tend to SURPRISE. Another problem is, when an analyst meeting is being held during trading hours, it's sometimes more difficult to discern reactions to statements because you have the noise of the markets superimposed.
That being said, it looks like they might have pre-announced in their meeting, though in the past few minutes as I was composing this... HWP just took out today's previous low, trading as low as 28.50 on a burst of volume after opening at 30.06. If we had been trying to play this we'd be using straight intraday TA while keeping tabs on the news, selling the stock short when it took out this morning's swing low (29.76). We also have the market tanking a bit... looks like Mrs. Fiorina will earn her keep today! :)
Good trading, -Steve |
