Royal Dutch Shell plc (ADR) (RDS.A): Is This a Shell Game, or Reality?

An otherwise active week of news among some of the biggest companies in the markets, the week in trading seemed to end with another pretty significant headline, and it was more for new that is coming.

A warning shot, and it comes courtesy of Royal Dutch Shell plc (ADR) (NYSE:RDS.A), which announced Friday in a warning to analysts and investors that its four quarter earnings report may likely show a significant profit miss from what the Street had predicted. CNBC had coverage of the story Friday, providing two segments of analysis about this.

The first one, from RBC Capital Markets analyst Peter Hutton, said this warnign by Royal Dutch Shell plc (ADR) (NYSE:RDS.A) is not really new information, but a reminder to the Street. Hutton commented that the question here is whether the profit miss is an underlying item in the report, or if it’s a one-time item that is normally stripped out for analysts to see the general health of the balance sheet. So far, there was no indication  which is the cause of this expected miss.

In the second clip from CNBC, Chris Tinker of Libra Investment Services discussed Royal Dutch Shell plc (ADR) (NYSE:RDS.A) and comments that this announcement by the company may fall under the heading of “reality check.” Tinker said his firm sent out a sell notice to its investors, which surprised some and went against the conventional thought about the company, and Tinker claimed that the fundamentals of Royal Dutch Shell plc (ADR) (NYSE:RDS.A) were a factor in the rating.

Here is Tinker’s segment: