m.mphoto / ShutterStock. Stop us if you've heard this before: it's been another wild for the stock market. A solid series of earnings releases are pulling against myriad geopolitical tensions as the market tries to find its bearings. Major indexes posted sharp gains earlier in the week, and it looked like we'd finally found the bottom of the selloff that had dominated the week before. The second half of this week, however, has seen most of

TijanaM / ShutterStock. Today, we're analyzing this week's kickoff for Q4's earnings season. The past few weeks have been particularly dramatic for equity traders, with a run-up to all-time records for major indexes followed by a dramatic multi-week fall that finally seems to be abating this week.  Markets stemmed the tide of the sharp pullback during last Friday's training, managing to end the day in positive territory. Yesterday, they put up some of the best on

Sophie James /ShutterStock.com. So far in our series on earnings, we've focused on evaluating evidence that provides the most recent possible perspective on a firm's financial health. Profiting on earnings announcements at the ???speed of the market??? requires r

691685071 = Sergey Molchenko. EDGAR (Electronic Data Gathering, Analysis, and Retrieval) is a public database maintained by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). EDGAR is used for automated collection, verification, organization, and dissemination of reporting documents submitted by firms as part of their regulatory responsibility as publicly traded companies.  The SEC was formed to oversee equity markets in the aftermath of the Great Depression

644212072 = GaudiLab. Few skills are more important to savvy investors than the ability to read an earnings press release. Of course, some of the best financial analysts in the world spend their entire lives developing the ability to strain truth and predictability from earnings reports. But, fortunately, you don't need a degree in Finance to extract the core information from these vital pieces of documentation. You may already know the bas