Alcoa Spits the Bit, EA is a Shonda…What Else is New?

Alcoa (AA) kicked off earnings season with a fairly typical miss, putting up a penny for the quarter with the consensus looking for 6 cents.

No one who’s been trading for more than 6 months is at all surprised, as Alcoa misses about half the time…it’s kind of their thing.

Irregardless (love that word), Dow futures are under pressure as the big Double A mentioned ongoing weakness in construction and aerospace, two key markets they sell into.

Last night, video game maker Electronic Arts (ERTS) came out with a horrendous 2010 full-year forecast and said business has not rebounded at all.  Once again, if you were around last week, you saw this coming when Gamestop (GME) put up incredibly weak same store sales numbers for the holiday shopping season.

If Gamestop ain’t moving units in the stores, how could a game publisher possibly have anything good to say?

These reports will present a challenge to the market…at best, they were fairly well-telegraphed so the market will simply use them as an excuse to take profits.  At worst, they will be looked at as a harbinger of worse to come as we gear up for the rest of the S&P 500’s announcements.

Too soon to tell.

(Shonda is a yiddish word for embarrassment or disgrace, ie: “I can’t believe Miriam allowed that daughter of hers to move in with Hyram the pickle pickler – he’s almost old enough to be her father!  What a shonda!)

Sources:

Stock Futures Fall After Alcoa Report Disappoints (AP via Yahoo)