Earnings missed expectations + price reacting down + options flow bearish. The drift after a miss runs as long as the drift after a beat.
The mirror of the post-earnings drift on the negative side. The company missed expectations, the market is selling the miss across multiple sessions, and the derivatives market is positioning bearishly. Three independent channels confirming the same negative story.
Bernard-Thomas 1989 documented that post-earnings drift is symmetric — the bottom decile of earnings surprises underperforms by ~7% over 60 days. Bartov-Givoly-Hayn 2002 confirmed the effect persists across regimes. The slow-reaction premise is the same as the bullish PEAD: markets under-react to large surprises initially and reprice over weeks.
Misses driven by one-time non-cash charges (impairments, restructuring) sometimes reverse fast when the next quarter shows operations are fine. Check the 8-K language to separate "operations broken" misses from "accounting noise" misses.