META, nee Facebook, reported earnings overnight that has the stock up by almost 20% in early trading this morning.

The gigantic move today puts the stock about 25% higher than its mid-pandemic peak 2+ years ago, a bit better than the performance of AAPL or MSFT over the same span. And this despite the company’s ill-starred bet-the-farm turn to VR headsets that caused the stock to plunge in the interim.

I’m not a META fan. I feel about it the way I feel about tobacco companies–I’m not going so far as to short them to offset their weight in the index funds that make up most of my wife and my equity exposure. But I don’t want to go out of my way to give them any active support. The point here is not so much to reveal my foibles as to underline that I’m not deeply knowledgeable about META.

Still, META is one of the largest companies in the S&P 500, with a weight of about 2%, similar to that of Microsoft, Apple, Nvidia or Amazon. It’s also a relatively mature company, with presumably tons of data available about it either from its own reporting or from users and competitors.

My question: how can earnings be so surprising to the market that the stock of an S&P behemoth is up by a fifth (!) on the news.

My answer(s):

–I don’t know

–professional securities analysts aren’t skilled enough or incentivized enough to do the digging needed to create reasonably reliable earnings estimates

–brokerage houses have clamped down on proprietary trading, so that even if professional traders had solid information from reliable analysts they couldn’t act on it

–both of the last two

In any event, I’m taking the reaction to the META report as support for the idea that Wall Street has shifted emphasis from reasoned anticipation of events to fast reaction to news. Much cheaper for them, much better for you and me.