How do you read an earnings day?
Four times a year, your anchor company faces its scheduled judgment: earnings day. You've met the calendar (Course 2) and the beat/miss logic (Course 1). Now assemble the full reading routine — the same one analysts run before their morning coffee cools.
The scoreboard's three numbers
An earnings report is hundreds of pages, but the market's first reaction keys on three comparisons:
- Revenue vs expected — did the business sell what the crowd forecast?
- Earnings per share vs expected — did profit per your slice (Course 1!) deliver?
- Guidance — management's own forecast for the next quarter/year. Frequently the heavyweight: markets trade the future, so a great quarter with a wary forecast often falls, and a soft quarter with raised guidance often flies.
"Expected" means the published analyst consensus — the visible benchmark the market carries into the day.
The choreography of the day
Release lands outside regular hours (Course 2 explained why) → thin after-hours trading takes the first swing → the real verdict prints at the next open, often as a gap → then the interesting part: does the gap hold and extend through the day (conviction — check the volume, Unit 2) or fade as the open's emotion drains? Day-one candles on earnings are among the most information-dense objects in markets — everything you've learned in this course reads them.
Beyond the numbers
The call transcript (management answering analysts) moves prices too — a hedged sentence about demand can outweigh a clean beat. You don't need to parse transcripts yet; know that when a price moves "against" clean numbers, the explanation usually hides in the words, not the math.
In the data
An earnings calendar keeps the scoreboard, one row per report. Here is Apple's of 30 July 2026:
Read the two dates first: the quarter that ended, and the day it was reported, about a month apart. Then the three numbers — expected earnings per share, actual, and the surprise between them in per cent — and the row that says whether the release landed before the open or after the close. One thing the row does not hold is revenue: an earnings calendar scores earnings per share only, and the revenue half of the scoreboard has to be read from the analysts' revenue consensus and the company's own filing.
Try it now
- Compute the EPS surprise yourself from the table above: actual minus expected, divided by expected, times 100. Then read the surprise row beside it. Your number should match it to the decimal — and now you know exactly what that figure is, rather than trusting a column whose formula you have never seen.
- Do the revenue half. A company can beat on EPS and miss on revenue in the same breath, and that pair is the reading a single headline number hides. For the same quarter, Apple's to 30 June 2026, the first table below holds the revenue the consensus expected and the second the revenue Apple filed. Compute the revenue surprise the same way as the EPS one, then set the two percentages side by side.
- Check the two dates while you are there. One is the end of the period being reported and the other the day it was announced; on a large company they sit about a month apart, and charting the move against the wrong one puts your gap on a day when nothing happened.
- Chart the day: the gap, the volume, hold-or-fade by the close. The report of 30 July came after the close, so the day to chart is 31 July: its row is below with the session before it, and the year of candles under it draws its volume against the fifty-session average.
- Note the NEXT report date, below, and whether the release lands before the open or after the close. You'll watch that one live — with a professional's checklist instead of a beginner's pulse.