Categories: OLD Media Moves

How Bloomberg News gets earnings releases early

Henry Blodget of The Business Insider writes about how Bloomberg News is able to get company earnings releases before its competitors.

Blodget writes, “It turns out that some companies don’t want to wait until the 4PM market close to post their earnings online, perhaps because they’re worried they’ll forget. So what they do is post them online earlier, but don’t link to the page from their web sites. This renders the page invisible–unless you know what to look for.

“Humans are creatures of habit, and the humans who post earnings releases on company web sites are no different than any other humans.

“Which means that if the web-page URL for a company’s second quarter’s earnings release was, say: www.disney.com/earnings/Q22010release

“It’s probably a safe bet that the URL for the third quarter’s earnings release will be: www.disney.com/earnings/Q32010release

“So the folks at Bloomberg just set their system up to ping the company’s server constantly in the hours before the press release is due to appear, in the hope that some dolt in investor relations will publish it before the market closes.”