RE:Q4 $22m revenue miss & $15m gross margin miss..There was nothing so terribly out of the ordinary in 2020 Q4 results as would have necessitated a pre-announcement.
IRD's results were absolutely ordinary.
As for WiLAN, it is common knowledge that its quarterly revenues can, and generally do, go wildly up and down. We know that in any particular quarter WiLAN's revenues might be effectively zero.
The stock happened to go down when Q4 numbers came out but I see no reason why it necessarily had to. Note that the analysts kept their buy ratings intact and there's been no indication that any of them were shocked by the result. I admit it was SOMEWHAT disappointing, but only somewhat.
If you look back on this board you will see that I, Mr. Moribund himself, predicted that Q4 would feature a loss and that the shares might move somewhat lower on the result. No inside info. Just a thoughtful (hopefully) reading of the publicly-available tea leaves.
With 2020 Q3 you had a case of the shares trading furiously at a low level which was, in retrospect, way out of line with where they could reasonably be expected to trade if the market were to understand how strong those results would be. So the company pre-announced.