Dell accidently posted its 2Q results on their website about 10 minutes before the close. They were supposed to report after the close. They immediately took it down, then fired off the press release to news wires about 3.55pm when they saw their stock up about .60 cents and that some people must have caught it. It closed up .98 and traded up another .60 after the conference call to $16.12 They beat by a penny or .23 cents, Rev's were about $150mm or so better then est. at 12.7bil. Michael Dell said on conference call that gross margins improved to 18.7% from 17.6% in the 1Q which is what goosed the stock a second time.
This is amazing because I would think pro traders would be looking at the bloomberg terminal not hitting refresh on dell's webpage.
It's not as amazing as you might think. Earnings are due at 4pm. The fastest place to get the actual press release is from the website. Headlines tend to come out on newswires, but the press release is what you want. All conference call participants are connected via the website. A webcast with slideshow is how conference calls are done now. Most 'professional' traders are doing away with Bloomberg. Its cost of $2600/month with entitlements no longer substantiates its use or its value added. There are much better charting services - theirs is outdated, company doc's are available on Edgar thru Yahoo Finance, we all use AIM instead of Bloom IM, they dropped their ECN last week BTRD because of lack of use. Mike Bloomberg is worth $8bil now, you'd think he would lower the price to save his company and employees? Many of us spend on services like: Briefing.com, Fly On The Wall, Tradethenews, etc... These services report news, rumors, estimates etc... -and scour websites 'hitting refresh' to give traders an edge. They are the ones that reported to all of us what happened on Dell's website. FYI.