How companies choose earnings release dates, & effect on Implied Volatility
"I can't speak authoritatively to your broader question about stocks in general, but in several years tracking AAPL closely, I can tell you that there's little apparent pattern to when their earnings call will be, or when it will be announced. What little I do know:  - AAPL's calls tend to occur on a Tuesday more than any other day of the week  - it's announced roughly a month in advance, but has been announced w/ less notice  - it has a definite range of dates in which it occurs, typically somewhere in the 3rd week of the new quarter plus or minus a few days More broadly for #1: Given the underlying nature of what an option is, then yes, the day an earnings call date is announced could certainly influence the IV/price of options - but only for options that expire inside the ""grey area"" (~2 weeks long) window in which the call could potentially occur.  Options expiring outside that grey area should experience little to no price change in reaction to the announcement of the date - unless the date was itself surprising, e.g. an earlier date would increase the premium on earlier dated options, a later date would increase the premium for later-dated options. As for #2: The exact date will probably always be a mystery, but the main factors are:  - the historical pattern of earnings call dates (and announcements of those dates) which you can look up for any given company  - when the company's quarter ends  - potentially some influence in how long it takes the company to close out their books for the quarter (some types of businesses would be faster than others)  - any special considerations for this particular quarter that affect reporting ability And finally:   - a surprise of an earnings call occurring (substantively) later than usual is rarely going to be a good sign for the underlying security, and the expectation of catastrophe - while cratering the underlying - may also cause a disproportionate rise in IVs/prices due to fear"
How does one buy this quantity of TIPS? Do you simply buy directly from the US Treasury? You will might have to go through a financial institution like a broker or a bank. Edit: You can also buy bonds directly with TreasuryDirect. Is it cheaper to buy a fund that invests in TIPS? It might be cheaper depending on the fund  itself. But you can't know for sure the price that the fund will be worth at you payout date. Since bonds can go up in value (and are likely to with rates this low), is there a way to measure potential downside? Statistically speaking yes. You can look at the variation in price/interest of the bonds in the last years, to see how they usually move, then compute the price range where they are likely to be (that can be wide for volatile securities). But there is no guarantee that there won't be some black swan event that will make the price shoot up/down. In another word, it's speculation Can I mitigate downside risk by choosing different TIPS maturity? There are quantitative strategies to do that, like finding that some products that are negatively correlated, such that a loss in one is be hedged by a gain in another. However those correlation are likely to be just statistics. And for every product that you buy you are likely to have to pay some fees for your bank/broker which can be more devastating than the inflation itself. Is there some other strategy I should be considering to protect my cash against inflation (or maybe a mixed strategy)? As I wrote above, trying to use complex financial products can incurs loss and will have fees (both for buying and selling). Is it really necessary to hedge from a 2% inflation by taking such risk? Personally, I don't think so. If I were you I would just be buying bonds maturing for your payout date. That would negate the reselling risk and reduce the fees. In principle, the stock price should see no change in the days leading up to an earnings announcement, and then at the moment of the announcement, the stock price should move in the direction of the earnings surprise (relative to the market's belief of what earnings were going to be). In practice, stock prices tend to drift a little in the direction of the surprise shortly before the announcement and the associated price jump. This could be because smart investors were able to replicate the computations to predict the announcement or because information gets illegally leaked ahead of the announcement.  So I guess your bullet point B is a likely scenario. Note that hedging activity in the options market will not affect stock price one way or another.  Options transfer risk from one party to another but net to zero.  Intense hedging activity may be able to push up the price of options (increasing the implied volatility), but it shouldn't affect the price of a stock one way or the other. For this reason, bullet point A is not the case. Note that price behavior after the announcement is also interesting: it seems to take some time to reach the correct price instead of jumping directly to it as economists would predict.   This phenomenon is known as post earnings announcement drift. "How accurate is Implied Volatility in predicting future moves? How would you measure this?  If the implied volatility says that there's a 1% chance that a stock will double, and it doubles, was it ""right""?  You could also say that it says there's a 99% change that it doesn't double, so was it ""wrong""?   What you could measure is the variance of daily returns over a time period, and see how well that compares to implied volatility, but there's no way to compare IV with the absolute price movement.  If a stock goes up 0.01 each day, then the variance is 0 (the daily returns are the same each day), but over 250 the stock would go up $2.50." To Whom It May Concern,  FUSE_33 is hereby free to discuss his future employment with whichever company(s) he/she so chooses.  CURRENT EMPLOYER makes no claim to the exclusivity of FUSE_33's employment with CURRENT EMPLOYER.  Further, CURRENT EMPLOYER hereby releases and holds harmless any entity which wishes to discuss hiring FUSE_33 for any position they see fit.      SIGNATURE &amp; DATE   PRINTED NAME   TITLE - CURRENT EMPLOYER      == Just tell your current boss that you've had a couple of places ask for a release letter so that they don't get accused and/or sued for head-hunting.  He doesn't need to know you're going to work for the school. There's an explanation of what that means a few lines farther down that page: It looks like they keep a record of ~600 days of their previous implied volatility calculations, but some symbols might not have that much valid data.  So when they report the current IV as a percentile of all those previous IVs, they want you to know exactly how reliable that measurement is. If they only have 30 days of past IV calculations, then the percentile doesn't mean all that much.  On the other hand, if they have 600 days of past IV calculations, then the current percentile is pretty significant. It is because 17th was Friday, 18th-19th were weekends and 20th was a holiday on the Toronto Stock Exchange (Family Day). Just to confirm you could have picked up another stock trading on TMX and observed the price movements. "The settlement date for any trade is the date on which the seller gets the buyer's money and the buyer gets the seller's product.  In US equities markets the settlement date is (almost universally) three trading days after the trade date.  This settlement period gives the exchanges, the clearing houses, and the brokers time to figure out how many shares and how many dollars need to actually be moved around in order to give everyone what they're owed (and then to actually do all that moving around). So, ""settling"" a short trade is the same thing as settling any other trade.  It has nothing to do with ""closing"" (or covering) the seller's short position. Q: Is this referring to when a short is initiated, or closed? A: Initiated.  If you initiate a short position by selling borrowed shares on day 1, then settlement occurs on day 4.  (Regardless of whether your short position is still open or has been closed.) Q: All open shorts which are still open by the settlement date have to be reported by the due date. A: Not exactly.  The requirement is that all short positions evaluated based on their settlement dates (rather than their trade dates) still open on the deadline have to be reported by the due date. You sell short 100 AAPL on day 1.  You then cover that short by buying 100 AAPL on day 2. As far as the clearing houses and brokers are concerned, however, you don't even get into the short position until your sell settles at the end of day 4, and you finally get out of your short position (in their eyes) when your buy settles at the end of day 5. So imagine the following scenarios: The NASDAQ deadline happens to be the end of day 2.  Since your (FINRA member) broker has been told to report based on settlement date, it would report no open position for you in AAPL even though you executed a trade to sell on day 1. The NASDAQ deadline happens to be the end of day 3.  Your sell still has not settled, so there's still no open position to report for you. The NASDAQ deadline happens to be the end of day 4.  Your sell has settled but your buy has not, so the broker reports a 100 share open short position for you. The NASDAQ deadline happens to be the end of day 5.  Your sell and buy have both settled, so the broker once again has no open position to report for you. So, the point is that when dealing with settlement dates you just pretend the world is 3 days behind where it actually is." I was merely trying to be helpful - Conceptually, you have dump this idea that something is skewed. It isn't. Firm A sold for $500 (equity value aka purchase price to shareholders) + debt (zero) - cash (50) for 450.  Enterprise value is the cash free, debt free sale price.  The implied ev multiple is 4.5x on A - that is the answer. The other business sold for a higher multiple of 5x.  If you would pile on more cash onto A, the purchase price would increase, but the EV wouldn't.      The idea is to think hard about the difference between equity value and enterprise value when examining a transaction.