The Next Best Thing to a Time Machine: My Top 3 Reasons I Love Earnings VIEW IN BROWSER I was ten years old the first time I saw Back to the Future in a movie theater. It was the summer of 1985. I remember sitting in that red fabric seat, feet barely flat on the floor, popcorn and Coke balanced carefully in my lap - no cup holders back then. The lights dimmed, the projector hummed, and for the next two hours I was somewhere else entirely. There’s a lot to like: the iconic car and soundtrack, the fantastic performances and sharp humor. But the thing that burned into my brain wasn’t the car or the jokes. It was the clock tower. What a great scene… The storm is rolling in. The cable is stretched across the street. Doc is shouting at Marty that lightning would strike at exactly 10:04 p.m. Not maybe. Not possibly. Exactly. As a kid, that idea felt - well, electric. Lightning — something wild and uncontrollable — suddenly had a schedule. A time. A place. All you had to do was be standing in the right spot with the right mechanism, and you could harness it to change the course of your history. 
I didn’t know it then, but that scene lodged itself somewhere deep. Years passed. School, college, careers. The movie became a cultural touchstone for a generation. But the idea stayed with me — the idea that chaos isn’t always chaos. Sometimes it’s structured. Sometimes it’s scheduled. Fast forward to my early days as a trader. Instead of a movie screen, I was staring at price charts. Markets are loud. There’s always a headline, always a hot take, always someone shouting about the next big thing. You turn your screen on and a stock is up 18% on some headline you didn’t see coming. Another one gaps down 12% overnight. By the time you read the news and understand what happened, the move is over and it feels like the ship has already sailed. It can feel random. It can feel unfair. It can feel like everyone else knew something you didn’t. But then I realized something that took me back to that theater in 1985... Not all volatility is random. Some of it is scheduled. Some of it comes with a timestamp. And if you know when and where the lightning is going to strike — if you build the right mechanism in advance — you don’t need to control the storm. You just need to be ready for it… Very early in my career I developed a deep love and appreciation for the simple earnings trade. They represent one of the rare moments in the market where uncertainty becomes structured. Sitting at the intersection of expectation, volatility, and psychology, they channel forces that drive price movement more than any headline ever could. And just like that clock tower scene – when you approach it correctly, it transforms what feels like chaos into potentially life-changing opportunities. | Recommended Link | | | | “Something very strange happened this week. NVIDIA released perhaps the best quarterly results in corporate history. And the stock got crushed. When the market opens on Monday, I believe we’ll see a violent reaction. I’ve seen this after practically every boom and bust cycle during my 40-year career which is why I recorded this emergency briefing before any of this happened. If you act this weekend, you can still get ahead of this.”- Louis Navellier. Click here to watch this emergency briefing and get all the facts. |  | | So today I’m going to share with you the three biggest reasons earnings setups are some of my favorite trades a person can take. No. 1 - We Know When Volatility Will Hit If you’ve made it this far, then you’ve probably already figured out that I love earnings trades because they answer two of the toughest questions a trader can face: "Where” and “when.” Most market volatility feels random. A Fed comment hits the tape. A geopolitical headline breaks. A CEO says something off-script on television. You’re reacting after the fact. With earnings we’re a lot like Doc and Marty – we know exactly where and when that lightning-fast volatility is set to hit. So now that we have the earnings date, we know the right time and the right place. What we still need is the right mechanism. No. 2 - High Probability Trade Setups In the movie, knowing where the lightning will strike isn’t enough. They have to capture it and direct it into the flux capacitor. So they build a wiring rig — a cable system designed to channel 1.21 gigawatts of raw energy into the back of the DeLorean. In earnings trades, that wiring rig is the trade structure itself — specifically, straddles and strangles. When traders think about earnings, most of them immediately start debating direction. “They’re going to beat. Guidance will be strong. Buy calls!” “This one looks weak. Buy puts!” The problem is that the market is already debating those things, too. Expectations are baked into the price before the company ever reports. A “beat” doesn’t guarantee a rally. A “miss” doesn’t guarantee a drop. What matters is how reality compares to what was already priced in. Early on, I realized that trying to outguess Wall Street on direction wasn’t a consistent edge. What was more interesting was how options were priced relative to the stock’s historical post-earnings moves. That’s where straddles and strangles come in. A straddle involves buying a call and a put at the same strike price and expiration. You’re positioned for a significant move either up or down, because one side gains value as the stock moves sharply away from that strike. A strangle is similar, but the call and put are purchased at different strike prices — typically out of the money. This structure usually costs less upfront than a straddle, but still benefits if the stock makes a large enough move in either direction. In both cases, the goal isn’t to predict where the stock goes. It’s to position for how far it moves. Instead of betting on up or down, we structure trades that benefit from movement itself. If history shows a stock regularly moves 8%, 10%, sometimes 15% after earnings, but the options market is pricing in a much smaller move, that’s a pricing discrepancy. Now we’re not asking, “Will they beat?” We’re asking, “Is this move underpriced?” That shift changes everything. It removes the emotional tug-of-war of being right or wrong on direction and replaces it with a probabilistic framework focused on volatility — the kind of preparation that turns our lightning strike into something useful. No. 3 - Repeatable Process My third and final reason I love earnings trades is that they’re not a one-off opportunity. This isn’t about catching a single lucky move. Earnings season starts all over again each quarter. Four times a year, the entire cycle repeats itself. Expectations build. Companies report. Volatility expands. It’s the next best thing to having a time machine. And because we have a battle-tested approach we’ve spent the past two years putting together some of the best trades of my career. We can scan for names with a history of large post-earnings moves. We can compare implied volatility to those historical moves. We can structure defined-risk trades that align with that data. And we can size them in a way that assumes some losses are part of the distribution. Then we do it again next quarter. This isn’t about hitting a grand slam every time. It’s about operating with a framework that gives us a statistical edge over a series of trades. That’s how professionals think. They don’t rely on one outcome. They rely on process. That’s the Power of Earnings When probabilities move, but price and volatility haven’t caught up yet, that gap becomes actionable. That’s where opportunity lives. Earnings season is where this strategy really shines. That’s when expectations collide with reality. When analyst forecasts meet hard numbers. When hype either gets validated — or breaks. And when expectations are even slightly misaligned, stocks can move violently. So far this season, we’ve already captured multiple double- and triple-digit percentage gains by focusing on one thing: Real money flow, not headlines. We look for moments when institutional positioning and probability signals start to diverge from consensus expectations. Then we structure trades around that gap. I’ve already used these signals to identify rapid moves in stocks like: - SunRun (151% in 2 days) • BHP (189% in 17 days)
- Alphatec Holdings (213% in 2 weeks)
- Fastly (300%+ in just over a month)
- Snap (375%+ combined in about 2 months)
Even this quarter, my closed trades are running at a 60% win rate, with an average return of 85.76% over roughly 31 days. That’s the repeatable edge we exploit. And right now, another setup is forming at the intersection of prediction-market probability shifts and under-the-radar earnings catalysts. In a new presentation, I’m walking through three high-conviction opportunities developing in sectors most investors aren’t paying attention to yet. If the market has ever felt random to you, this will show you that it doesn’t have to be. Watch the presentation and see how we position ourselves when we know exactly where — and when — the lightning is going to strike. Remember, the creative trader wins. | 
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