{"slug": "ai-driven-trading-rewriting-the-rules-of-profit-season", "title": "AI-driven trading rewriting the rules of profit season", "summary": "AI-driven trading is rewriting the rules of profit season, with machines listening to earnings calls in real time and trading on nuances before humans can react, causing sharp share-price swings. Commonwealth Bank's shares swung from a gain of nearly 1% to a loss of 1.4% within 90 minutes during its $11bn profit result, and other companies like Charter Hall, SGH, Seek, and Life360 saw drops of 6% to 20%, while CSL and Judo jumped 17% after results. Companies are now using AI analytics to tailor their presentations to this new machine audience, with some even using AI-generated presentations, as noted by executives speaking to The Australian.", "body_md": "# AI-driven trading rewriting the rules of profit season\n\nThere’s a new fund manager in town, and it never blinks.\n\nIt listens to every word of every results call, scrapes the transcript in real time, and places a trade before the CEO has finished the sentence.\n\nThe result, this profit season, has been a wave of share-price whiplash that has left human investors wondering what just happened.\n\nFund managers say the real theatre is no longer in the numbers themselves – those are released, digested and priced within seconds – but in the results briefing that follows.\n\nThese calls typically run for 90 minutes and are almost always webcast: the chief executive delivers an overview, the chief financial officer works through the numbers, and the second half is handed to analysts and fund managers for questions.\n\nIncreasingly, it is not the analysts doing the real-time listening. It’s the machines – picking up nuance that never made it into the prepared slides, and trading on it instantly.\n\n[Commonwealth Bank’s $11bn profit result](https://www.theaustralian.com.au/business/commonwealth-bank-boss-matt-comyn-delivers-record-11bn-profit/news-story/12e3301d8e73d28a5049576b0314f570) was a case in point. In the space of 90 minutes, the bank’s shares swung from a gain of nearly 1% to a loss of 1.4%.\n\nThe moves came between 10.30am and midday, while chief executive Matt Comyn and chief financial officer Alan Docherty were still speaking.\n\nAnalysts on the call were focused on the slowdown in new mortgage lending – Comyn noted applications were down 15% since May’s budget changes. Moments later, the algorithms caught up and the shares reversed course.\n\nBut Comyn suggested there was a bottoming, and CBA gained some lost ground. In the end, the humans won out as the bank gave up almost 10% over the following week. Although well run, CBA is almost universally viewed by humans as overvalued.\n\nElsewhere the moves have been more violent still.\n\n[Charter Hall fell 6% on Friday](https://www.theaustralian.com.au/business/alp-tax-switch-to-drive-investment-out-of-housing-charter-hall/news-story/8b84c776ada8239bd26dfd49f93d12b4) despite meeting expectations. SGH dropped 10% on modest softness in top-line revenue. Seek fell 15%. Life360 shed almost 20%.\n\nMeanwhile [CSL](https://www.theaustralian.com.au/business/companies/lower-us-vaccination-rates-and-chinese-sales-hit-biotechnology-giant-csl/news-story/66c02b726cff91e2c47fae6a828f11d0) and Judo, which had both been hammered by profit warnings ahead of their results, jumped 17% once the actual numbers landed.\n\nExecutives who spoke to The Australian are increasingly conscious of the role played by quantitative funds: trading desks built on deep statistical analysis of company financials, and now at the sharp end of AI-driven strategy.\n\n**New audience**\n\nCompanies now are quietly rewriting their scripts with this new audience in mind.\n\nRetailer Ruslan Kogan took this to the extreme a year ago when [AI delivered a flawless presentation using Kogan’s voice](https://www.theaustralian.com.au/business/kogancoms-ruslan-kogan-presents-financials-impersonating-himself-with-ai-bot/news-story/7f557dfd797727c5135ebaa208c97a71) and that of his chief financial officer David Shafer. The real executives handled the Q&A session.\n\nOne chief executive told The Australian their team now runs presentations through an AI analytics filter before delivering them to the market. “The market has moved, and we’re moving with it,” he said. The exercise, he added, “helps land the message.”\n\nThe analysis goes well beyond word count. It scores presentations on tone, on the density of adjectives, even on the degree of alignment between what the CEO says and what the chief financial officer says minutes later.\n\nAmong the firms offering this kind of service is Quantium, the data analytics group backed by Woolworths. It began life analysing retail loyalty data before broadening into corporate advisory work. Its ranks now include former Westpac chief executive Brian Hartzer, who heads its financial services practice; it is chaired by Nine Entertainment chairman Peter Tonagh, with co-founder Adam Driussi as CEO.\n\nNot every company is comfortable with the practice. “It’s a credibility issue,” one chief financial officer said. “The market will ultimately uncover the real story, so we have to speak to that” – rather than engineer the message for algorithmic consumption.\n\nFund managers have coexisted with high-frequency trading for more than a decade. But this reporting season, they say, has brought something qualitatively different.\n\n“I genuinely think that when bots buy, they have no regard for valuation,” says Raaz Bhuyan of Wavestone Capital. “Everyone tells me these market changes are structural. In my mind, you can only gamify a market for so long, and I feel like we’re now seeing the other side of it.\n\n“We’re not done yet – there’s plenty of reporting still to come. But aside from the companies that have genuinely struggled, others have been punished regardless. If something was seen as a ‘safe’ stock – not because the valuation was right, but because the price kept climbing on passive or price-insensitive buying – I think you’re now seeing that unwind.”\n\nBhuyan is blunt about who is driving the moves. “You’ve got the bots, and then you’ve got fund managers trying to emulate the bots. But they’re all on the same side of the trade. It’s herd mentality. And when you try to do a U-turn at a hundred kilometres an hour, people get hurt.”\n\n**Villain or powerful tool**\n\nNot everyone views AI as the villain of the piece.\n\nFor active managers, it remains a powerful tool for processing the sheer volume of information that reporting season generates.\n\nHassan Tevfik, a veteran strategist with MST Financial, says it can help “quantify the qualitative” far faster than any analyst working by hand.\n\n“We used to do this manually. You can still only take AI so far – at some point you need to apply your own judgment. But we use it to process the transcripts, the language, the slides, at a pace we simply couldn’t manage before.”\n\nEven so, Tevfik believes something has genuinely shifted in how prices move. “Some of these moves are just absurd – a tiny wrinkle in a profit report triggers a reaction wildly out of proportion. Part of it comes down to leveraged, multi-manager hedge funds now making up a much larger share of the market.”\n\nTevfik says the rise of passive investing has also made more stock available to lend to hedge funds, so the cost of borrowing is cheap. “You’ve got access to leverage, access to cheap borrow – but you no longer have as many active managers on the other side of the trade willing to take the opposing view.”\n\nOne edge the machines will hold over conventional fund managers, though, is stamina. Hundreds of results are released across four frantic weeks of reporting season, and no human analyst can absorb them all with equal intensity. The bots can.\n\n*This article first appeared in The Australian as **How AI-driven trading is rewriting the rules of profit season for investors**.*\n\n## Related Topics\n\n### UNLOCK INSIGHTS\n\nDiscover the untold stories of emerging ASX stocks.\n\nDaily news and expert analysis, it's free to subscribe.\n\nBy proceeding, you confirm you understand that we handle personal information in accordance with our\n[Privacy Policy](https://stockhead.com.au/privacy-policy/).", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/ai-driven-trading-rewriting-the-rules-of-profit-season", "canonical_source": "https://stockhead.com.au/tech/ai-driven-trading-rewriting-the-rules-of-profit-season/", "published_at": "2026-08-25 05:21:10+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-08-25 05:43:03.102182+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["artificial-intelligence", "machine-learning", "ai-products", "ai-tools"], "entities": ["Commonwealth Bank", "Matt Comyn", "Alan Docherty", "Charter Hall", "SGH", "Seek", "Life360", "CSL"], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/ai-driven-trading-rewriting-the-rules-of-profit-season", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/ai-driven-trading-rewriting-the-rules-of-profit-season.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/ai-driven-trading-rewriting-the-rules-of-profit-season.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/ai-driven-trading-rewriting-the-rules-of-profit-season.jsonld"}}