When Are Extreme Daily Returns Not Lottery? At Earnings Announcements!

Abstract

Using a sample of U.S. stocks over the period 1973–2015, we find that quarterly earnings announcements account for more than 18% of the total maximum daily returns in the top MAX portfolio. Maximum daily returns as triggered by earnings announcements do not entail lower future returns. Both portfolio and regression analyses show that the MAX phenomenon completely disappears when conditioning MAX returns on earnings announcements. We further show that earnings announcement MAX returns do not indicate a probability of future large short-term upward returns. Excluding earnings announcement MAX returns in constructing the lottery demand factor results in not only a larger lottery demand premium but also superior factor model performance.

Keywords: Extreme returns, Earnings announcements, Lottery-like payoffs, Cross-sectional return predictability

JEL Classification: G11, G17, G12