Which news actually moves prices?

A hundred headlines mention your anchor company every week. Two or three will ever matter to its price. The filter separating them has a name in securities law and a logic you already half-know.

The materiality filter

News moves a price only when it's material — capable of changing a reasonable investor's estimate of future profits — AND new, meaning not already priced in (Course 1's expectations lesson, now sharpened). Run every headline through both gates:

• "Company X releases new product" — material? Maybe. New? If leaked, previewed and teased for months, the market bought the rumor long ago; the announcement is often just the receipt.
• "Company X CEO resigns unexpectedly" — material AND new: expect a real reaction.
• "Analyst reiterates neutral rating" — usually neither: nothing about the future changed, nothing unknown revealed.

The four heavyweight categories

Watching what history has actually moved prices, the news that matters clusters tightly: results and forecasts (earnings, guidance changes — the company's own scoreboard); structural events (mergers, breakups, big contracts, regulatory verdicts); leadership shocks (unexpected departures, scandals); industry-wide turns (a competitor's disaster, a technology shift, new regulation). Almost everything else — daily commentary, price-target shuffles, "stocks to watch" listicles — is entertainment wearing news clothing.

Where material news is required to appear

Materiality is not only a judgement; for the heavyweight categories it is a filing obligation, which is why the news that matters tends to arrive with a timestamp. A US domestic company must report the events on the SEC's Form 8-K list — a completed merger, a CEO's departure, a bankruptcy filing among them — generally within four business days, and an earnings release, when it issues one, is furnished on the same form within four business days — in practice usually the same day, with the full quarterly accounts following later on Form 10-Q; and under Regulation FD (2000), if it tells favoured analysts something material on purpose it must tell the public at the same time, and promptly if the slip was accidental. Most foreign companies listed in the US qualify as what the SEC calls foreign private issuers: they publish under their home country's and home exchange's rules, hand the SEC a copy on Form 6-K afterwards, and sit outside Regulation FD — so the clock to measure from is the original home publication, not the SEC copy; the few that fail the SEC's ownership and business-contact tests are treated as domestic and file like one. EU-listed companies sit under the Market Abuse Regulation, which requires inside information to be published as soon as possible and defines its own exceptions — a rulebook that was rewritten in 2026, so read the current text rather than a summary. So the big items reach a public channel — a filing, a wire, the company's own site — with a time on them, and the price reaction can be measured from that time rather than argued about afterwards.

Direction is the market's, not yours

One trap: "good news → price up" fails constantly, because reaction = news MINUS expectations (a "beat" below whispered hopes falls; a smaller-than-feared loss soars). You can't read the expectation from the headline — only the market's reaction reveals it. Which is why professionals watch what price DOES on the news, not what the news "should" do.

Try it now

1. Read a company's most recent headlines. Each item in a news feed carries a date, a headline and the article itself, so you are reading the same feed a professional would. The top of Apple's is below; for your own anchor company, open it in the Terminal and change the symbol there.

Open AAPL.US in the EODHD Terminal

2. Stamp each headline twice — material? and new? — then sort them into the four heavyweight categories, or into "entertainment".
3. Count the survivors. Two out of five is a generous day, and now you know why professionals read fewer headlines more carefully.
4. Test the direction trap on one of the survivors. Take its date and find that day and the two around it on the month of Apple below. Did the price do what the headline "should" have made it do? Reaction is news minus expectations, and only the price tells you where expectations were.

5. If you want a machine's read on tone rather than your own, data providers score the same feed for sentiment, from -1 (gloomy) to +1 (glowing). Five scored days of Apple's are below. Treat it as one more piece of evidence, not a verdict — the previous step is the one that actually settles anything.