“Earnings season” is the time when most companies report their quarterly and annual earnings. It can be quite intense and move the market or at least individual stocks, in case they beat or miss the expected earnings numbers. So as an investor you sure want to know when the companies you care about report their earnings.
But when is this “season” actually? Okay, let’s find out…
1. Read filing index
So let’s assume you have downloaded the filing index files for the full last year from the SEC. (See here how to do it.) And saved these files for Q3, Q4, Q1 and Q2 like this:
master_2016_Q3.idx
master_2016_Q4.idx
master_2017_Q1.idx
master_2017_Q2.idx
Now we use this little bit of Javascript to read these filing index files into an array of objects:
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let fs = require('fs');
let filings = [];
const readFilingIndex = (filename) =>
fs.readFileSync(filename,'utf8')
.split("\n") //lines
.slice(11) //remove 11 header lines
.slice(0, -1) //remove last line (empty)
.map((filing) => { //convert filing index into array of objects:
Based on our definition of earnings season we are only interested in quarterly and annual reports. So we can use this neat one-liner to filter only these filing types:
This nicely shows the beauty of functional programming and how concise things can be with arrow-functions.
3. Calculate weekly and monthly distributions and display results
Now that we have focused on all quarterly and annual reports for one full year we can calculate the weekly and monthly distribution (frequency) of these filing types.
To handle the conversion of dates I use the powerful moment.js library.
ascii-histogram comes in handy is an easy but useful way to display the data as a histogram:
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let moment = require('moment');
let hist = require('ascii-histogram');
let weeklyDistribution = {};
let monthlyDistribution = {};
filings.forEach((filing) => {
let filingDate = moment(filing.DateFiled, "YYYY-MM-DD");
Very roughly one can say the earnings season is in the second month of each quarter (February, May, August and November). The weekly distribution also shows that “the season” starts slowly in the first week, then peaks in the 2nd and 3rd week and slows down in the 4th week of the month.
So why is it like that? Well, the companies are required to post their quarterly reports between 40 and 45 days after the end of the quarter. More detailed explanations can be found here.
If we look closely, we can also see that in the first quarter of the year the distribution looks a little bit different. The “earnings season” in Q1 starts later and extends longer into the quarter. This is because most companies finish their fiscal year in Q4 and are therefore reporting their annual report in Q1, which has slightly different rules than the quarterly reports (annual reports are due 60 to 90 days after the end of the year). This can be seen better when we filter only for annual reports:
