ASML Q3 FY12/25 Earnings Review

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Did He Just Say What I Thought He Said?

Usually in a company’s earnings release there is nothing insightful to be read, because it has been lawyer’d from here to eternity before hitting the wires. To me if you want to understand earnings there are two ways to do it.

1/. The quickest and most reliable way is to just ignore earnings and focus on technical setups; what does the chart tell you, what does the orderflow tell you, what does your quant system tell you. And trade accordingly.

2/. is more fun but takes an age and is less reliable but sometimes you can find an asymmetric nugget that really helps you. You can listen to the earnings call live and ignore the actual words said but instead listen for the spaces between the words; the silences, delays, coughs, changes of tone or pitch, hospital-pass handoffs between execs on the call, or my favorite of all, an inexplicably delayed call (thankyou $OKTA for that one back in 2021!) whilst, I assume but don’t know, everyone has a big fight about who is going to say what and why, before taking the stage.

ASML’s numbers were good this quarter as you can see below, and the stock is doing fine. The signal for me though isn’t in the numbers and it’s not in the chart. It was, a first in my experience, in the press release.

Here’s the signal.