Most common its a quick reaction the first minute after the numbers came out and then the markets react exactly on the opposite way.... Check out the chart on the last ADBE earning on thursday for example... ---------------------------- A good one to build an straddle before earnings should be INSP, (look at the last 3 Q announcements)... Tradeables after hours earnings in my opinion are: GOOG, AMZN, PALM (due out this Thu), NVDA, CREE, YHOO, SINA, EBAY, INTC, RIMM and of course im forgetting some stocks... Awful after-hour in this days are MSFT, CSCO, AMAT, DELL, (the last one was good), BRCM, KLAC,ORCL i mean, this stocks give us pretty afterhours trading Qs ago but we have been watching choppy announcements for a while, you know... Anyway its my opinion, someone could be more comfortable in that kind of AH. I call "tradeable" an announcement with volume and huge movements to both sides , or at least to 1 side (like the last announcement on DELL) with at least 1.50 points of range...
Certain "staid" Naz 100 stocks like CSCO, MSFT, ORCL, etc. are range-bound and choppy. Best to go after liquid "movers": RIMM ERTS AAPL EBAY YHOO QLGC QCOM BRCM KLAC ADBE (lately) SIRI (lately) XMSR (lately) and yes, watch for the stocks with high "trade rates" (ticks per second). Example: NWAC on Thurs, Friday.
How does one profitably trade off stocks that have wide ranges.. what types of pattern or tape reading do they look for?
I personally follow particular patterns that are repetitive during the first couple of hours of the session: if you stalk stocks at the open you'll notice that when they gap up, rise, after half an hour they retrace and then they start running again or sometimes they can continue to slide. I give you an example: AAPL on positive earnings gaps up around $4 start running up $6 and then start retracing all day to close up $3. The following day it picks up what was left on the table and keep running for the rest of the week. This year what I described has occour all the times AAPL has beaten the street AAPL is one of the stocks that retrace and slide.