Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. (NYSE: BABA) is set to report earnings on Tuesday. This will mark the Chinese online marketplace for everything’s first earnings report as a public company. The initial public offering (IPO) in September was the largest in U.S. history, and the relatively small float has helped this stock weather a big storm in the markets after its IPO. Then the recovery the second half of October helped to propel Alibaba shares back to new highs.

24/7 Wall St. has created a full 360-degree earnings preview for the online marketplaces giant. Alibaba will report its formal financial results before the open on Tuesday, and it will host a conference call to discuss its results at 7:30 a.m. Eastern Time.

Thomson Reuters has expectations set at $0.45 in earnings per share (or roughly $1.15 billion in net income from operations) on $2.64 billion in revenues. If these targets are hit, these represent growth of roughly 45%.

We have yet to understand how exactly Jack Ma and his team will handle their guidance, or even if guidance will formally be set as other companies do. Thomson Reuters has estimates for the fourth quarter at $0.76 in earnings per share and $4.41 billion in revenues.

Alibaba’s pre-IPO filings showed several things from the June 30 quarter: operating margin was down to 43.4%. We also went through the final filings ahead of the IPO and showed the massive number of risks in the filing being the largest we have ever seen. The active buyers were listed as 279 million at the end of June, up from 255 million at the end of March.

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Several other issues are up for grabs as well. First is that Alibaba’s Tmall and Taobao have started finding competition, with more of an emphasis being seen in Tmall growth. The company has also admitted that it has not been as successful in mobile as it has in the value generated from desktop users.

Options traders may have yet to be a major indicator since the IPO is still so recent. That being said, speculative options trading would seem to indicate that options traders are braced for a move of up to $4 or so in either direction. What is interesting here is that the current options expiring this week have trading volume that is close enough to equal in current trading (13,000 calls versus 11,500 puts, both rounded). Then there is the open interest, with a larger bias in the puts for the current run, at 51,712 puts and 34,372 calls. This would indicate that investors are either speculating on disappointing earnings or that they are buying insurance for a stock with very lofty valuations.

Speaking of valuations, Alibaba is worth close to $250 billion in market cap — which we recently noted as rivaling that of GE. As the stock has been public less than two months and as the shares have hit new highs, we have no chart analysis to offer other than its trading history.

 

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Wall Street analysts seemed very aggressive on their formal ratings for Alibaba. That being said, our full analyst montage released last week indicated that the actual price targets were set at levels that were not that aggressive.

Alibaba hit a post IPO high on Monday when shares were trading up over 3% at $101.61 in the first two hours of trading. Shares originally entered the market at $92.70 after the IPO on September 19, eventually falling to a low of $82.81 almost a month later during the sell-off in the first half of October. The post-IPO range was $82.81 to $101.94.

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