Dunno.. but I think it's a pretty good buying opportunity. DYODD, YMMV

I don't claim financial expertise, but revenue missed (the completely artificial and meaningless) estimate by about 1%. And it grew 19% vs. the year-prior period. I think some analysts wanted 22%, even if they forecast 20% growth. They forecast a number, and they're supposed to be good at what they do, but they still want to be, you know, surprised. In most circles, going from 7B to 8.17B is good, especially if you wanted 8.25B. But this isn't about that. This is about suckering people to buy or sell at the wrong price.

I also think a lot of institutional buyers bought some time ago, and have been talking up the stock, and probably sold the small but tidy bump they enjoyed since.

Not to worry: when the retail investors freak out on the 10% drop, the'll move back in, and talk it up 15% by the next quarter's results. By which time, surprise, surprise, we'll find out they moved out again.

They're essentially shaking us little guys silly, to see if any money falls out of our pockets.

Yep, I would buy if I were you.

Listen in to the earnings call:

Live Call: Delta Air Lines, Inc Earnings Conference Call (Q2 2010) - Yahoo! Finance

Reducing regional lift which has higher RASM and CASM and replacing it with MAINLINE. It's about time.

Give us a play by play! For those of us building their raw score and flattening their butts this morning.

Overall revenue better, shoud continue to improve. Cautious with capacity changes. Cargo revenue up. Advanced bookings remain strong. Well ahead of last year. Transatlantic is healthy. South America will be strong, lots of business travel. Domestic and International capacity should be up YOY.

I would take the time to read the SLI transcripts. Start with page 1218 which has Stevens testimony. Here is a summary posted before.

///In reading the transcripts of Dave Stevens testimony, isn't it obvious now that we can put to bed one nasty episode in this whole merger soap opera. It seems pretty clear that, contrary to the official communications of the Northwest MEC, the Delta MEC tried repeatedly to get the Northwest pilots to engage in negotiations during LOA 19. They also tried to get the original deal for the Northwest pilots, only to be rebuffed by Delta management. Finally, once the Northwest MEC determined they were being left behind, they tried to scuttle the Delta deal.///

In addition DALPA's use of LOA 19 was exactly in accordance to what was stated at the time it was signed. It was not used as a few NWA pilots screamed it would be on this forum. To their credit several of those pilots later retracted their claims and admitted that DALPA followed through exactly as they said they would and did not attempt to use the agreement as leverage in the SLI.

One last point, LOA 19 was based on the joint contract negotiated by both sides and then not put into place because a agreement could not be reached on the SLI. There was a significant NWA participation on most aspects.

Which is it? BS or true?

"fuel hedge ineffectiveness" ???

This euphemism really ticks me off. They used to report a number but management now does their best to hide the money they lose gambling in the commodities markets. At least the analysts have caught on. Glad to hear them ask the question why our "non-operational" losses are so high.

Still hard to pick out exact numbers but it sounds like they lost either $90 mil or $72 mil on fuel hedges for the quarter.

About equal to employee profit sharing.