Maneuvering the Ups and Downs of Earnings Season (AAPL, AKAM, FSLR, V, GMCR, CERN, POT, GLW, JEC, MSFT, BIDU, AKAM, FSLR, V, GMCR, CERN, POT, GLW, JEC, INTC, JPM, BAC, GOOG, YUM, NFLX, BIDU)

Earnings season can be a time of both angst and tribulation for investors, as stocks quite often make their biggest moves the days following a company’s report. To make matters worse, sometimes investor sentiment doesn’t always seem to match a company’s results. For example, it’s not uncommon for a strong earnings beat to be met with selling pressure, while sometimes a company that announces only so-so results sees its stock rise.

To help investors navigate earnings, BullMarket.com now publishes earnings previews each Friday during earnings season. The previews look at historical earnings data and EPS trends; examine past investor reactions to earnings in various contexts; gives options activity analysis; reviews previous-quarter earnings; and gives an opinion on both what earnings will look like and how investors will react based on the aforementioned data points.

In its earnings previews for the week of July 26th-30th, BullMarket.com looks at several popular stocks, including Akamai Technology (AKAM), First Solar (FSLR), Visa (V), Green Mountain Coffee (GMCR), Cerner (CERN), Potash Corp. (POT), Corning (GLW), and Jacobs Engineering (JEC).

The past two weeks, BullMarket.com used the data to correctly predict investor reactions for 14 of 17 stocks, including: Intel (INTC), JP Morgan Chase (JPM), Bank of America (BAC), Google (GOOG), Yum Brands (YUM), and Netflix (NFLX) Baidu.com (BIDU), and Apple (Nasdaq; AAPL), among others.

BullMarket.com’s earnings previews generally average between 20-25 pages, but also have concise summations for each stock. Here is a brief sample of BullMarket.com’s earnings analysis from last week:

“After a stretch of only meeting or missing EPS estimates four out of five quarters, Microsoft has been able to solidly top analyst estimates the past three quarters. Meanwhile, the stock has fallen following earnings six of the past eight quarters. Seasonally, the company has tended to rally into Q2 earnings the week before and then sell-off. Thus, while we expect a solid earnings report, we’d expect a pretty muted investor response.”

“Outside of earnings, we think Microsoft is cheap and on the verge of a solid growth cycle powered by an enterprise PC refresh cycle. In addition, ancillary businesses – including gaming (Xbox, Kinect), search (Bing), and cloud computing (Azure) – look like they are gaining momentum. We would put a $34 price target on the stock, which is only a modest 13x multiple on 2011 EPS estimates after stripping out its approximately $3.56 per share in cash.”

Tags: AAPL, AKAM, BAC, BIDU, CERN, FSLR, GLW, GMCR, GOOG, INTC, JEC, JPM, MSFT, NFLX, POT, V, YUM