TTE Brent-beta decoupling after EPS misses: 10d/20d vs trailing 120d
TotalEnergies has long traded like a leveraged proxy for Brent crude: when oil moves, the stock tends to follow, with a trailing 120-day beta around 0.30. But an earnings miss is a different kind of shock, and the data suggest it changes that relationship.
We tested seven usable quarterly EPS misses. In the 10 days after a miss, TTE's average beta to Brent dropped to 0.16; over the next 20 days it fell to 0.10 — roughly a third of its pre-miss level. The 20-day decoupling is statistically solid (p≈0.02), with six of seven events showing a lower beta. The 10-day shift is weaker, a lean rather than a definitive break.
The full breakdown and methodology follow. The pattern fits a straightforward thesis: a miss forces investors to reprice company-specific execution risk, at least temporarily, before the crude-link trade takes back over.
After TTE reports a quarterly EPS miss, does its 10-day daily-return beta to Brent crude fall below its trailing 120-day beta, and does that decoupling persist over the next 20 trading days? I expect a large miss to break the stock's crude-link trade because investors reprice it on company-specific execution risk rather than oil beta.
How this was measured
TTE minute bars were resampled to daily closes and joined with the global Brent crude daily series on common trading days. Daily returns were computed for both series, and beta was estimated as the OLS slope of TTE daily returns on Brent daily returns. For each quarterly EPS miss (surprise_percentage < 0), the first TTE return date on or after the report was anchored as t0. The trailing 120-day beta used the 120 daily returns ending before t0; post-miss betas used returns t0+1 through t0+10 and t0+1 through t0+20, excluding the earnings-day return itself to avoid the idiosyncratic earnings shock. Paired t-tests compare post-miss betas to the trailing beta across usable events.
The key numbers
Reading the numbers
Across 7 usable TTE earnings misses, Brent beta averaged 0.30 before, 0.16 in the 10 days after, and 0.10 over the next 20 days. That supports a weaker crude link on average, but p=0.1917 means the 10-day drop is not statistically clear.
The charts
The trailing 120-day window averages a beta of 0.305, with values from 0.175 to 0.486, while the post-miss 10-day window averages 0.164 but ranges from -0.144 to 0.598. The average drops after the miss, but the wide spread shows that one event had a much higher beta, which is why only 71% of individual misses produced a lower 10-day beta. That pattern is consistent with a broken crude-link trade on average, but it is not a clean shift across all events.
The bars show the same story at a glance: mean beta steps down from about 0.30 before the miss to 0.16 in the 10 days after, then to 0.10 in the 20 days after. The 10-day decline of about 0.14 and the 20-day decline of about 0.20 both point in the direction of decoupling. The caveat is that with only 7 events, the 10-day change is not statistically clear at the 5% level. The 20-day horizon looks more consistent on average, with 86% of individual events showing a lower beta than before the miss.
TTE EPS miss events: Brent beta windows
| report_date | surprise_pct | pre_120d_beta | post10_beta | post20_beta | delta10 | delta20 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2024-02-07 | -7.69 | 0.294 | 0.598 | 0.071 | 0.305 | -0.223 |
| 2024-07-25 | -4.81 | 0.237 | 0.131 | 0.132 | -0.106 | -0.104 |
| 2024-10-31 | -2.79 | 0.269 | 0.345 | 0.386 | 0.075 | 0.117 |
| 2025-04-30 | -0.54 | 0.485 | 0.216 | 0.24 | -0.269 | -0.245 |
| 2025-07-24 | -13.33 | 0.369 | -0.048 | -0.047 | -0.417 | -0.417 |
| 2025-10-30 | -0.56 | 0.175 | -0.144 | -0.017 | -0.318 | -0.192 |
| 2026-02-11 | -2.26 | 0.305 | 0.052 | -0.044 | -0.253 | -0.349 |
The takeaway
On average, yes: TTE's crude link does weaken after an EPS miss, and the decoupling gets more convincing as the window lengthens. Mean beta to Brent drops from roughly 0.30 over the trailing 120 days to 0.16 in the first 10 days after a miss and 0.10 over the next 20 days — by the 20-day mark, beta is about a third of its pre-miss level. That 20-day drop is statistically clear (p = 0.02, roughly a 2-in-100 chance of being luck), and 6 of the 7 usable misses produced a lower 20-day beta. The 10-day shift is weaker evidence: p = 0.19, with only 5 of 7 events showing a lower beta, so at that horizon it's a lean rather than a definitive break. The practical read is that a miss does tend to reprice TTE on company-specific execution risk rather than oil, and that repricing is more visible after a few weeks, but with only seven events the exact magnitude is fragile and near-zero misses are lumped in with large ones.
The fine print
- Only 7 of 40 raw EPS misses had enough surrounding data to use; each post-miss beta is built on just 10 or 20 daily returns, so individual estimates are noisy and p-values are fragile.
- The first post-report trading day is excluded from both windows; including it could materially change the post-miss beta numbers.
- Daily TTE and Brent closes aren't perfectly synchronized across holidays and time zones, which can pull measured betas down, especially over 10 days.
- A miss is any negative surprise (smallest was -0.54%); no separate large-miss threshold is tested, so the 'big miss breaks the trade' version of the question is only partly answered.