OpenClaw for Earnings & Estimates

What Is Earnings Season?

Four times a year, a wave of chaos hits Wall Street: earnings season. This is when public companies report their quarterly financial results — revenue, profit, earnings per share (EPS), forward guidance, and more. For 4–6 weeks, hundreds of stocks report, and the market reacts hard.

The Three Stages

Understanding the earnings cycle is key to automating what happens next:

Why It Matters

Earnings season is violent. A single report can move a stock 10–20% overnight, sometimes more. It's not about whether the company made money — it's about whether they made as much money as Wall Street expected.

Here's the key insight: Wall Street analysts publish their predictions weeks ahead of time. The consensus estimate is the median forecast across all covering analysts. When the company reports, the market compares:

• Actual EPS vs. Consensus EPS → Beat or Miss?
• Actual Revenue vs. Consensus Revenue → Better or Worse?
• Forward Guidance → Will earnings grow or shrink?

If a company beats expectations by even a penny per share, the stock can pop 5%. If it misses by the same margin, it can drop 8%. This volatility creates both risk and opportunity — but only if you track it systematically.

What OpenClaw Automates

Without automation, earnings season is a sprint of manual checking. With OpenClaw, it's systematic, repeatable, and hands-off. Here's the before and after:

OpenClaw does five distinct jobs:

1. Earnings Calendar: Pulls your watchlist's upcoming earnings dates from yfinance. Alerts you 3 days before any company reports.
2. Consensus Estimates: Tracks EPS and revenue estimates. Shows when analysts revise up or down — that's the real signal.
3. Surprise Tracker: Logs every beat and miss automatically. Over time, you see which companies consistently beat estimates — that's edge.
4. Price Reaction Logger: Captures the overnight move after each report. Build your own dataset of how stocks actually react to earnings.
5. Daily Brief: One email before the open on every earnings day. Who reports today, what analysts expect, historical beat rate, and average move.

The Free API Stack

Every tool here uses completely free APIs. No credit cards, no rate limits that matter, no surprises on your bill.

yfinance is the workhorse. It has earnings dates, consensus estimates, actual reported numbers, and historical price data all in one place. The others layer on depth, but yfinance alone is enough to build a serious earnings automation system.

The earnings-config.yaml File

This is the single source of truth. You edit this file once, then all five automation tools use it. No code changes needed.

watchlist:
  tickers: [AAPL, MSFT, NVDA, AMZN, GOOGL]

calendar:
  lookahead_days: 5
  alert_days_before: 3
  market_hours_only: false   # include pre/after market reports

estimates:
  track_revisions: true
  revision_window_days: 30
  sources: ["yfinance"]

surprise:
  log_history: true
  flag_threshold: 5.0   # % beat/miss worth flagging
  csv_path: "data/earnings_history.csv"

reaction:
  capture_window: "open_next_day"
  log_to_csv: true
  csv_path: "data/price_reactions.csv"

alerts:
  email: "you@example.com"
  daily_digest: true
  send_time: "06:30"

scheduler:
  earnings_brief:
    script: earnings_brief.py
    schedule: "30 6 * * 1-5"  # Every weekday at 6:30 AM

Everything is a parameter:

• watchlist.tickers — Your list of stocks to track
• calendar.lookahead_days — How far ahead to pull earnings dates (5 days = coming week)
• calendar.alert_days_before — Email alert this many days before report (3 = Wednesday before Friday report)
• estimates.track_revisions — Monitor when analysts change their EPS forecasts
• surprise.flag_threshold — Only log beats/misses above this percentage (5% = meaningful surprises)
• reaction.capture_window — Which price point to log (next day open is best for overnight move)
• scheduler.earnings_brief.schedule — Cron expression for when to send the pre-market email

Installation

First, install the Python libraries:

pip install yfinance pyyaml pandas requests

That's it. yfinance, PyYAML, and pandas are all that's needed for the core system. requests is for API calls if you add OpenBB or FRED later.

The 5-Part Series

Each module teaches one piece of the earnings automation system. Start with Earnings Calendar, end with Daily Brief. Each builds on the last.

Quick Start (5 Minutes)

pip install yfinance pyyaml pandas

python earnings_calendar.py