When a company does report its earnings, markets will react to the “news” in the report but the way we measure the news has to be relative to expectations. Thus, a company that reports that its earnings went up by 30% may be seen as delivering bad news, if investors were expecting an increase of 40%, and a firm that announces an earnings decline of 30% may be providing positive information, if the expectation was that earnings would decline by 40%. Thus, it is not the magnitude of the earnings change that matter but the “surprise” in the earnings, measured as the earnings change relative to expectations–wrote Aswath Damodaran
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