Get Ready for Earnings Season - Wall Street's Quarterly Shell Game

It's earnings season. In fact it's prime time for companies' first-quarter earnings.

For company players the game is about trying to beat analysts' estimates, to get your company's stock to pop so you look better than your reflection.

But, the game is rigged.

What! Another rigged game on the purposely muddied fields where Wall Streeters play?

Yep. Another rigged game.

And like high-frequency trading (HFT) and so many other "institutionalized" games on the Street that are sucking the life out of other people's dreams, it's not illegal.

This is the norm...

The game is called managed earnings, or managing earnings.

The most successful gamers play with a gusto that crosses over the legal border. They juggle their books to shove losses and profits into columns, drawers, and boxes depending on what their objective is for that particular accounting period.

Maybe they made too much money and want to hide some for another quarter where they don't make what analysts expect. Maybe they bury losses somewhere so they don't look as bad in a reporting quarter.

It's about manipulation.

Earnings Season

That part of the game is illegal. But because it's merely accounting hocus pocus, the worst a company gets - when the facade of its magic show is blown - is a slap on the wrist.

If you want a history of how to play this part of the game to perfection, look how General Electric under Jack Welch, performed - I mean managed - their earnings. All I'll say is you just can't have your earnings come out to the penny quarter after quarter after quarter without internal prestidigitation.

While that locker room game is for seasoned pros, every company plays the field game.

On the field it's all about what analysts' estimates are.

If your company earnings beat what analysts expect, you're a winner. If your earnings fall short, you're a loser and so is your stock.

And where do these highly touted Wall Street analysts get their estimates from?

I'll tell you where, but you're not going to believe it...

They do their homework and study the company's business and sales and margins and everything else they have to look at to determine what they think a company is going to be earning that quarter.

Oh, and they talk to the company.

That's the real game: Talking to the company... And getting their take on their earnings.

For heaven's sake if all your big shot peers are putting out earnings estimates you don't want to be the only one who is wrong! That's why they all talk to the companies they cover.

It's a mutually beneficial game, for the most part. The analysts don't want to be too off the mark and companies want their earnings to come out better than the analysts' consensus estimates.

Of course companies don't want their earnings to be a negative surprise and come out far below the consensus. If that happens their stock gets clobbered. And that does happen - but not why you think.

The game for companies is to "guide" analysts they talk to. If they're having a bad quarter relative to a year ago and everyone is thinking they're doing well, their job is to guide analysts' expectations down. That's right, they tell analysts things aren't as good as they'd expected or hoped for. Then all the analysts, who don't want to look stupid, ratchet down their earnings estimates right before the company reports.

And presto! When earnings come out, miraculously, they "beat" consensus estimates and their stock pops higher.

It's manipulation. But it's not illegal.

The problem is that average investors don't understand the game. Earnings come out and they're better than the consensus, things must be good, right? Maybe.

What gets lost in translation is how much the analysts were guided. It's a regular phenomenon: Consensus estimates fall right before earnings reports come out.

The analysts should not be able to speak with the companies they cover. If the company wants to guide earnings expectations lower, they should post an SEC-filed statement for analysts to follow and the public sees for themselves.

Then when earnings come out, analysts should report their original earnings based on their estimates and the difference between original estimates and their ratcheted-down estimates.

News reports should have to display analysts' original consensus estimates at the beginning of the quarter and latest estimates and calculate the increase or decrease in the consensus. That way the public can see how the company did over the quarter relative to how it was expected to do - before it guided analysts' consensus estimates down WITHOUT TELLING THE INVESTING PUBLIC.

So far this quarter, the first quarter of 2014, analysts have lowered their growth estimates from the beginning of the quarter to right before companies started reporting by 5.6 percentage points.

Did you know that? Did you know that earnings estimates had been guided down so much? I doubt it. No one announces that. It's just an adjustment between the analysts and the companies they cover.

I'm not even going to get into how most of the big bank analysts don't just cover these companies... they work for them. On Wall Street they call that a symbiotic relationship.

So, how come companies miss ratcheted-down estimates and have to endure their stocks dropping as a result? Because if companies actually guided down enough they'd be torn between letting the cat out of the bag early and seeing unwanted headline news clobber their stock. They'd rather hope and pray the market will be strong when their crappy earnings come out and their stock will get lifted in a general euphoria.

It's a dirty game. It should be cleaned up.

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About the Author

Shah Gilani boasts a financial pedigree unlike any other. He ran his first hedge fund in 1982 from his seat on the floor of the Chicago Board of Options Exchange. When options on the Standard & Poor's 100 began trading on March 11, 1983, Shah worked in "the pit" as a market maker.

The work he did laid the foundation for what would later become the VIX - to this day one of the most widely used indicators worldwide. After leaving Chicago to run the futures and options division of the British banking giant Lloyd's TSB, Shah moved up to Roosevelt & Cross Inc., an old-line New York boutique firm. There he originated and ran a packaged fixed-income trading desk, and established that company's "listed" and OTC trading desks.

Shah founded a second hedge fund in 1999, which he ran until 2003.

Shah's vast network of contacts includes the biggest players on Wall Street and in international finance. These contacts give him the real story - when others only get what the investment banks want them to see.

Today, as editor of Hyperdrive Portfolio, Shah presents his legion of subscribers with massive profit opportunities that result from paradigm shifts in the way we work, play, and live.

Shah is a frequent guest on CNBC, Forbes, and MarketWatch, and you can catch him every week on Fox Business's Varney & Co.

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