How Will Delta Air Lines Stock React To Its Upcoming Earnings?

Delta Air Lines (NYSE: DAL) is set to announce its earnings on Thursday, October 9, 2025.

For traders focused on specific events, examining the stock’s historical response to earnings can yield a crucial advantage, regardless of how the actual results compare to consensus predictions. Traders usually leverage historical trends in two key ways:

• Pre-Earnings: Position themselves based on the historical likelihood of movement prior to the earnings announcement.
• Post-Earnings: Assess the connection between immediate and medium-term returns after the announcement and adjust their positions accordingly.

Historically, DAL stock has demonstrated a significant negative tendency following earnings reports. In the past five years, the stock has recorded a negative one-day return in 65% of cases. The median one-day drop has been ?2.7%, while the largest one-day decrease has been ?9.0%.

Consensus predictions estimate earnings at $1.52 per share with total sales of $15.94 billion. This is an increase from last year’s quarterly earnings of $1.50 per share on revenues of $15.68 billion.

From a fundamental perspective, Delta Air Lines currently has a market capitalization of $37 billion. The company reported $62 billion in revenue over the past twelve months, achieving robust operational profitability with $5.8 billion in operating profit and $4.5 billion in net income.

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Delta Air Lines’ Historical Chances for Positive Post-Earnings Returns

Some insights on one-day (1D) post-earnings returns:

• There are 20 earnings data points recorded in the last five years, with 7 positive and 13 negative one-day (1D) returns noted. In summary, positive 1D returns were observed approximately 35% of the time.
• However, this percentage drops to 33% if we review data from the past 3 years instead of 5.
• The median of the 7 positive returns is 6.2%, while the median of the 13 negative returns is -2.7%

Additional data for the observed 5-Day (5D) and 21-Day (21D) returns post earnings are collated along with the statistics in the table below.

Relationship Between 1D, 5D, and 21D Historical Returns

A relatively lower-risk strategy (though not effective if the correlation is weak) is to comprehend the correlation between short-term and medium-term returns after earnings, identify a pair with the highest correlation, and implement the suitable trade. For instance, if 1D and 5D demonstrate the highest correlation, a trader might take a “long” position for the next 5 days if the 1D post-earnings return is positive. Below is some correlation data based on a 5-year and a 3-year (more recent) history. Note that the correlation 1D_5D signifies the relationship between 1D post-earnings returns and the subsequent 5D returns.

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