When a company has beaten for eight straight quarters, investors price in a ninth beat. Published consensus-estimate stays at the official figure while positioning reflects something higher, so an in-line result behaves like a miss.
The whisper is not observable directly. Its proxies are options-implied move, recent price action into the print, and the size of recent beats, which together say how much good news is already in the price.
Example: consensus for Northwind Tools is $0.98 but the stock has run 14% into the print and options imply a 9% move. A $1.01 print, a three-cent beat, still leaves the shares down 5%.
Related: consensus-estimate, earnings-beat, earnings-report, estimate-revision, implied-volatility