Thread by @Srasgon

Typical earnings night. Most of my companies report after the close and it is usually a late night.

https://twitter.com/muppettrading/status/1268330268785553408

Release comes out, say, 4pm. Call might be at 5pm or so.

Release out. I quickly tie out with my treat (say, 5-10min). They go to gay the groundwork for the note and start updating model for the quarter.

I spend the next hour until the call starts writing down questions

My old thread on earnings call Q&A is relevant to that

https://twitter.com/srasgon/status/987463130816053248

At the same time I’m speaking with clients and, often, reporters.

Call starts. I listen, take notes, write down other questions as they might occur to me, and wait for my turn in the sun (and hope the company does not leave me off!)

Let’s say the call ends at 6pm. Afterwards I call up the team again, we talk through what mgmt said, and talk through potential storylines for the call (the sell-side job is one of storytelling).

They go to work on the call exhibits.

I get on the phone.

Here’s where I may differ from many other sell siders. I own most of our models, not the team. This means that I am usually the one that has to update the forecasts.

This is a legacy of my background...

I stumbled into the sell side (I’ll tell that story someday). But I had never built a model when I started. So I wound up building them much too complex. And a dozen years later as a consequence I’m still the one updating them.

But this means I become the bottleneck. On earnings nights it’s not uncommon for me to be in the phone for 3-4 hours after the conclusion of the conference call between clients and the mgmt callback.

But after the calls are done I sit down with the model. Call it 9-10pm.

In the meantime my team has updated all call exhibits, made any new/bespoke ones, and updated the initial “here’s what happened” text in the call.

Then I get into the call, with team on the phone, and we write the “So what?” part of the call. Call it 11pm-midnight by then.

Then we paste in new model, update ticker table etc. I have the team proof things and I send them home. Midnight on a good night.

(For some of my larger more complex companies it can stretch to 2am-3am, especially if something controversial or unexpected happens).

And then I sit there and try to think of a title...

Titles are INCREDIBLY important in my opinion. My prior thread on that here

https://twitter.com/srasgon/status/1246459861098835969

I’ve sat there for another hour on occasion trying to think up something good.

So at this point call it anywhere from 1am to 4am.

Once I have a title I put it in, and gove he piece one more once-over.

Then before I submit I write out a summary script and leave a recorded blast voicemail (some of my clients like it and have signed up to receive).

Then I submit the piece.

Then I go downstairs (I work from home). But I can’t go to sleep until I see the piece actually published as my titles get rejected by my SAs on a fairly regular basis :-) plus sometimes other issues pop up. But once it hits the wires I can go to sleep.

Sometimes we have multiple names reporting. In those cases we have to divide and conquer, and it’s likely we’ll have to leave some of the more in-depth analysis aside. But I am fortunate because of where I work I don’t have to cover 40 companies so it’s single earnings usually.

Earnings would be much quicker if we just did a one-pager with a model update and didn’t talk to anyone during the evening (I see plenty of those, usually hitting the wires on Bloomberg before I’ve even had a chance to open my model).

But I made a decision long ago not to do “news reporting” on anything. This means that we try to go deep on earnings, try to surface insights, or irregularities, or interesting paths for further work). But it takes time.

(Again, if I covered 40 companies and had 5 reporting simultaneously in an evening I’d probably have a different take on that...)

But anyway, that’s a typical earnings night for me...

*team, though they can be a treat too :-)