Expecting to Be Surprised : An Analysis of Price Responses to Earnings Announcements

It has been well-documented that prices respond quickly, if not completely, to the information in quarterly earnings announcements. In this paper we show that after conditioning on past earnings surprises, companies that meet analyst expectations have positive (negative) returns following a prior negative (positive) surprise. We attribute this price response to investors expecting to be surprised, in that they expect past earnings surprises to continue into the future. As meeting expectations is a reversal of the surprise trend, the investors react to this new information by reversing the price trend. The price response to meeting earnings forecasts appears to be due to investor overreaction, with subsequent returns undoing the overreaction