Bank of America released a list of stocks to buy right before earnings. This is the financial equivalent of telling someone which lottery tickets to scratch.
The timing here deserves recognition. Wait until companies are about to report actual results, then issue your best ideas. It's like a meteorologist predicting yesterday's weather. Either the stock goes up and BofA takes credit, or it tanks and everyone forgets they said anything because seventeen other banks published contradictory notes the same week.
These are third-quarter earnings recommendations. The quarter already happened. The revenue already printed. The margins already compressed or expanded. The CEO already knows if he's about to apologize on a conference call or brag about operational excellence. But sure, your technical analysis will crack the code.
Retail traders will read "Bank of America is bullish" and immediately buy calls expiring in three days. They'll watch their accounts bleed out by Wednesday and genuinely wonder what went wrong. They had a headline from a bulge bracket bank. They had conviction. They had $847 in buying power.
The stocks aren't even named in the summary. Bank of America highlighted "some of its best ideas" without specifying which ideas those were. This is content about a list you can't see. It's like getting excited about a restaurant recommendation and then learning the restaurant's name costs extra.
Imagine being the analyst who writes these notes. You get your MBA, you grind through analyst programs, you build models until your eyes bleed. And your big moment is publishing a report two days before earnings that twelve people will skim and four hundred retail traders will misinterpret.
The real trade was shorting the reading comprehension of anyone who thinks a bank's pre-earnings conviction list is anything more than liability management dressed up as research.
Photo by Oren Elbaz on Unsplash
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