SuckyMayor's Sucky Earnings Journal

[Ticown]

Thanks a lot for posting that !

They’re planning on building the two chip factories with construction expected to begin late in 2022 and chip production start is expected in 2025. So that won’t impact earnings right away.

They’re still heavily impacted by chip shortage and it will likely stay that way until 2023 (according to the CEO, so probably an optimistic estimate)
So I think that they’ll have similar earnings to Q3, either a bad response to lower sales YoY followed by a drop, or already priced in and going sideways

[SuckyMayor]

I appreciate the hype and good DD, just wanted to clarify the intent of this thread is to track the decisions I make before earnings calls, why I made those decisions, and the outcome of them in terms of dollars gained/lost. DD that we do on specific tickers really should be on their own thread, I would hate to lose the information.

[maybeyes]

Have you looked to see if SPY influences these signals at all? I can imagine if a ticker starts following SPY to some extent it may change which signal this produces. Either way thank you for writing all of this out. Excited to see how the week goes.

[SuckyMayor]

Let’s kick this off! I’m much cooler than @Conqueror so I’m starting with $500 as a balance. And by cooler I mean I drained most of my trading account.

Tonight I played IBM and successfully called the movement as Bullish. While we were faked out around $137, we still saw gains of just under 3% after earnings. I know this isn’t payoff your mortgage money, but I want to talk about that a little later.

What I Saw
Remember that my earnings strategy is predicated on price movement in the middle of the final 15 minutes of market hours. Looking to the chart we could see a pretty significant upward movement between 3:46PM and 3:54PM.

Part of why I spent so much time building my new tool out is so that I could do slope analysis on previous earnings to see what was in line and where the theory fell apart. I found that “larger” slopes actually tended to favor my theory. With this slope coming in at 0.08, previous slopes favoring my theory being in excess of +/- 0.02, I decided to position myself expecting growth after the call.

How I chose my position
Pretty straightforward when a stock shows bullish, you can buy calls or shares. Looking to historical performance on bullish earnings I could see that IBM averaged 3.4% growth over the past 8 earnings (losses average -7% after earnings). 1.034 * 128.76 = 133.14. I actually even called this out on the trading floor:

These aren’t incredibly favorable numbers, however on a starting balance like my own small gains are everything. My position ended up being:

• 3 shares @ 128.75 = $386.25 spent
• 1 lotto call - $157.50 @ 0.09 premium = $9 spent
• Total Cost = $395.25

What is going to happen?
Once the stock started moving I jumped in and setup a trailing stop loss. Around $135 I setup a trailing stop loss order that was stopped out around 4:15 at $137.33. This resulted in:

• 3 shares @ 137.33 = $411.99 - Profit of $25.74 and completely covers my lotto call and then some
• Assuming my call is a total loss (may not be), total gain of $14.74 or 2.9% increase on my portfolio

Special Note
I saw posts about how no one won this earnings, and that holding positions through earnings is not profitable. I want to dispel that myth. You can make this into steady gains IF you:

• Play ITM or ATM
• Play shares with trailing stop losses

That is all! Good game to all who played!

[SuckyMayor]

Yes! The SPY rally today scared the crap out of me and had me worried on my first thread update and was part of the reasons I took shares instead of a single ITM call.

The hope is that a slope analysis will overcome some of the overarching market sentiment in such a small window, but we’ll see what my success rate looks like going forward!

[SuckyMayor]

Sorry guys, discord done went and died today. TSLA showed bearish per the theory.

[GRIZZLYWINTERS]

It’s really great to see your thought process. Thank you for posting this!

[SuckyMayor]

I got a little busy yesterday…and also today and discord died, so let me do a multi-day retrospective here.

January 25 - Microsoft (MSFT)
Yesterday I was watching MSFT and those on the Trading Floor may recall I said “I’m not playing this one.”

Stocks like Microsoft are mainstays in investors portfolios because they’re pretty dependable - if you studied Microsoft every day for a year you’d be able to time their ups and downs pretty well. Part of building out this tool is an attempt to obtain other variables by which to assess the current state of the performance. Doing my slope analysis I could see that in previous earnings calls the slope was generally between -2 and 2, and leading into earnings on Tuesday we saw a slope of -0.22. This is a huge tenfold variance from what it normally is, and was immediate cause for concern:

Earnings Date	Time of Day	Slope
1/25/2022	amc	-0.224
10/26/2021	amc	-0.0089
7/27/2021	amc	-0.04
4/27/2021	amc	-0.0335
1/26/2021	amc	-0.056
10/27/2020	amc	-0.088
7/22/2020	amc	0.001
4/29/2020	amc	-0.006

In my blog post, I learned that overwhelming movement in one direction turns an earnings call into a coin toss, so I decided to sit this one out. While my classification would have declared this a “strong bearish”, the result was actually 6.64% growth overnight meaning I would have lost big on any puts I may have opened.

I actually closed yesterday having made no moves and no profit on earnings. Which worked out fine because I was SUPER busy all day with work. But I did manage to play a single SPY call and made a whopping $7.00 which put me up to a new grand total of $523.74, or an increase of 4.7% on the week.

January 26 - Tesla (TSLA)
Amongst the debacle of Discord being down I failed to get a signal out for this one, however prior to the window opening I had already decided that I wouldn’t be positioning for the call itself.

The result of the window analysis was that the stock would be bearish through earnings, however in the above you can see this stock really doesn’t move much through earnings. Listening to Elon it’s likely because they don’t give much information in their earnings calls - they have product launches that they don’t discuss in earnings, so all you’ll get here is facts and guidance.

Tomorrow I’m going to be watching TSLA. I have another theory that I’m going to put into place which is:

• Between now and market open we want to reassess the window between market close and market open to determine if the stock has moved up or down
• Once determined, I will look to see movement in the some direction running until about 10AM. At that point, once I see candles change color, I will position myself in the opposite direction of the morning movement.

Basically the morning will remove some of the premiums, and I will be able, ideally, to position myself for a small scalp on TSLA options. My balance as of today was still $523.74.

Thanks everyone! (Edited to include charts)

[SuckyMayor]

Another busy couple of days with work, however pretty massive changes to the way that I’m looking at earnings and how I’m playing my positions. A guide will be put together to expound upon the three legs of the earnings strategy loosely summarized as:

• The DD to discover sentiment moving into earnings
• The earnings call itself
• The post-earnings movement and sentiment

Conqueror did a phenomenal job outlining these three legs and where the money is to be made after RH failed upwards (Analyzing our earnings plays), and I’m going to start to look at earnings differently. Namely:

• Good DD is still the foundation of significant profits. The most money to be made on earnings happens when the directional seed is planted weeks before the earnings call and you ride the whole train into the earnings date. On the date of earnings cut your positions. This is leg one of earnings.
• The call itself can be wild and can make people a good amount of money. BUT less than 10% of earnings result in wild double digit underlying price swings that are capitalized on. If you hold on hope to the 10%, you’ll get burned 90% of the time and only break even if you’re lucky (will expound upon this).
• The final leg is simply playing the volatility of the underlying after earnings. The IV crush has occurred by market open, and that’s where you can play the trend and make out big.

So let’s talk about what I did this week! But first and foremost, my IBM lotto absolutely expired worthless, so I lost $9. I started Thursday morning with a balance of $523.74 as noted above.

TSLA
TSLA had okay earnings but not enough to save the stock from dropping. Seeing that there was a trend in the morning to continue down, I wanted to position myself until 10AM EST and purchased (2) $680 lotto put. At this time the underlying was moving up, so the premium on these puts was dropping, and I filled them for $0.20 each. While there were scary points throughout the day in which it didn’t look like TSLA decline was going to make this profitable, I actually managed to sell these puts for a total of $0.30, turning a cool profit of $20. My balance as of yesterday was $543.74, [color=#33b864]or an increase of 8.7% on the week.[/color]

I cut the position and didn’t position myself for any earnings calls, which turned out to be a good thing because I was wrong on 2.5/3 of them:

Very effin’ wrong

Pretty wrong but I didn’t feel confident that I would be right
This one actually fell into that “Too bearish” territory that should have been a red flag

Pretty right, but considering how it opened I would also say that this was at least half of a failure

So not positioned at all for the coming day, I decided to play it the same way I played TSLA which leads to today…

AAPL
Apple had crazy earnings and I had an idea that a similar strategy may work with them, considering they shot to $166.87 overnight on earnings and had no reason to believe that they would reverse. I waited until roughly 9:45AM and bought (5) 167.50C for 0.31, totaling $155.00. While I would have made a killing had I held that to the end of the day, I watched the first run up of this option hit 0.95, and I ended up selling for 0.93, or 200%. This yielded a total return of $310.

Heading into the weekend my portfolio size is now $833.74, [color=#33b864]a change of 66.7% on the week.[/color]

This was a very good week and has informed how I may approach earnings a little differently heading into next week. I was very busy this week so I wasn’t very active in trading, however that may have been a benefit. All in all, my week in a chart looked like:

Ticker	Position Type	P&L
IBM	Shares	$25.74
IBM	Option	-$9.00
SPY	Option	$7.00
TSLA	Option	$20.00
AAPL	Option	$310.00
—	—	—
TOTAL		[color=#33b864]$353.74[/color]

I’ll go through and identify some earnings again this weekend that I will be playing, however I will be changing my strategy to mirror what I did with TSLA and AAPL. Have a great weekend everyone!

[SuckyMayor]

It’s been a hectic week full of ups and downs and life stuff so today will be a novel. I appreciate anyone who sits down to read this one!

The market, as many of us are aware, was all sorts of problematic for anyone trying to pick a direction and I had personally had some great success and some stupid blunders that largely resulted in a loss on the week. These are all learning experiences, though, and is part of the reason I keep my account small. I’ve had the benefit of only seriously trading in a post-COVID inflated market landscape, so these are all experiences I intend to have, screw up terribly, and then learn from.

But lets get into it!

This week I said to myself “I’m going to play 3/5 of FAANG because they’re all up” so I was looking to Google, Facebook and Amazon this week in that order. Understanding that I’m trying to be a better trader and getting less thrills from gambles that go my way, I’m trying to stay away from playing the earnings calls as much especially if I haven’t done DD on them and have no reason to believe that they’re going to move +/-10% overnight.

With that said I’m still making calls for y’all, lots of people get value out of it and I hope I’ve gotten some of you out of potentially devastating positions as a result.

[size=4]The Trading Floor Callouts[/size]
Tuesday, February 1st

• Starbucks - Called that it looked bullish but also was a “Who the hell knows what this thing is going to do.” I consider this a failure because even though it shot up to $99.15 in response to the buyback, it did technically open lower
• AMD - Called that this looked bullish and was pretty confident in it, the stock opened at $130.00 and then bled for the entire day (I also played the next day quite poorly, will get into that later. This was a success on the theory.
• Google - Called that this looked bearish even though I really didn’t want it to be. This was not the case, it ended up being bullish but then it bled all of the next day because of a shelf offering. This was a failure on the theory.

Wednesday, February 2
All eyes were on social media on Wednesday and boy did they screw the pooch.

• Facebook/Meta - I called this one as bearish as well and this killed everything. I would have loved to have been wrong here, but unfortunately the market reeled the next day as a result of poor forecasting and missed earnings.
• Qualcomm - I called this one as bearish and it was, so it’s technically a success for the theory. However they weren’t bearish because they had bad earnings, it appears to have been in sympathy with the Facebook devastation that was happening right next door. I recognized pretty quickly after earnings that they had pretty good earnings and that this would present an interesting opportunity to play the next day.

Thursday, February 3
I really only had intentions of looking at Amazon and hoping for the best, but @macromicrodick did ask if I could look at PINS as well so I included that in my chart watching for the day.

• Amazon - I called this as bullish and it was, I also saw a nice pullback happening in the premarket this morning and I knew I wanted to get in on this hyper-expensive premium stock and also made a good win here.
• Pinterest - I called this as bullish and it was, and we also saw great performance by Snapchat. Both of these two were beaten down on the day because of Facebook’s performance, and I know quite a few people played the call. Kudos to all who profited and shame on me for sitting this one out.

[size=4]My Moves This Week[/size]

Quick recap - I started the week with $833.74.

I had a super not-exciting week start to the week. The tickers I played this week included:

• SENS for funsies
• AMD
• QCOM
• AMZN
• RCL

SENS
This one needs the least amount of explanation. We’re building to an FDA approval and while I am not an FDA/Pharma expert I can recognize momentum when I see it. I picked up a single $3 February Call on Tuesday morning and sat on it until Friday when I sold it to go stupid into Amazon.

Ticker	Type	Quantity	Buy	Sell	Profit
SENS	$3 Call	1	$0.19	$0.40	[color=#00FF00]$21.00[/color]

AMD
Oh AMD. You enabled me to screw myself super hard this week. I felt wildly confident walking into this play and during it I was doing all of the right things. Except submitting my orders. When I failed to

I opened (3) $130Cs and very very stupidly took a completely unnecessary loss on 2 of them.

Ticker	Type	Quantity	Buy	Sell	Profit
AMD	$130C	1	$1.27	$1.90	[color=#00FF00]$63.00[/color]
AMD	$130C	2	$1.27	$0.05	[color=#FF0000]-$244.00[/color]

So I ended my first actual trading day down $181, really hurting my returns last week and entering day two with $652.74.

QCOM
Redemption play! QCOM had great earnings but got a bad response because of the FB nonsense, so I figured there would be a good opportunity to play a corrective wave. I jumped into $200 calls on Thursday morning and got them at an average cost $0.60 per contract. I only grabbed two because I got burned going overzealous into AMD, but was able to get out of both at $1.20, a full 100% return.

Ticker	Type	Quantity	Buy	Sell	Profit
QCOM	$200C	2	$0.60	$1.20	[color=#00FF00]$120.00[/color]

This helped offset my dumb loss on AMD, putting my balance at $772.74.

AMZN

This is where I took my SENS gains from earlier, putting my balance back up to $793.74.

Amazon was the one I was looking forward to the most. Their call was on a Thursday night, killing IV going into a Friday morning and setting up a potentially very profitable play this morning. Again still reeling from my dumb AMD move I opted to buy a single 3300C contract at $0.61knowing that it probably wouldn’t go ITM. I was able to get out of it when the premium had nearly doubled to $1.21, securing a profit of $60.00.

Ticker	Type	Quantity	Buy	Sell	Profit
AMZN	$3300C	1	$0.60	$1.21	[color=#00FF00]$61.00[/color]

And this is the exact point I should have stopped trading. I was up to $854.74, which would have been a total profit of 2.5% on the week - not too shabby and certainly admirable enough, but…

RCL
I went stupid again. I bought $79C for RCL thinking I saw a cup and handle forming but instead it was a fake out after a double top. While these were cheap, $0.10 per contract, I did buy 5 of them and they surely lost all value. I actually paid an additional $50.00 to roll these options to next week, so I lost $50.00 on this play. That put my weekly total to $804.74, or a total realized loss of [color=#FF0000]3.5%[/color] on the week.

[size=4]What Did I Learn This Week?[/size]
I am actually really good at strategizing what to play when it comes to these earnings. What I need to learn is to stop overextending myself and trying to do things that aren’t a part of that strategy. This means that some days I will not trade at all, and that’s okay. I also need to recognize when I’m actually too busy to make a play that I want to, as this is what happened with AMD - I got busy and made a mistake. Next week will also likely be very boring for me as I’m going to be very busy and I need to recognize this up front.

[SuckyMayor]

Next Week’s Strategy
With most anticipated earnings published this week I’m taking a slightly different approach with lessons learned from last week. Specifically the following are the earnings I’m watching this week will be:

• Lyft
• Uber
• Disney
• Twitter

Watching is the operative word, unless conditions are favorable for a scalp on Lyft I actually have no intentions of playing that ticker.

The Uber and Lyft Sympathy Play
Last week we saw some serious sympathy movement between the social media tickers after FB screwed the pooch, which was then followed by a massive reversal. We also saw the same thing a couple weeks back when NFLX bombed, catching DIS in the riptide. My intention for Tuesday night will be:

1. Watch Lyft’s preclosing movement to do my best estimate in how it will move
2. Position myself in Uber for that movement
3. Likely sell off that Uber position the next day based on market movements throughout the morning
4. Do the same thing that night with Uber’s earnings call and ONLY position if it’s flagging in the opposite direction

With this I’m finding two related industries that have earnings in the same week and trying to use one to predict the pre-earnings movement of the other, and then only positioning in the other if I see a stark reversal. If I had taken this approach with PINS and SNAP, there would have been some money to be made in both directions so I want to give this idea a shot this week and see how it pans out.

Super important to remember that my small account is not the difference between paying my bills or not so I’m usually okay to try out strategies that may not work in service of becoming a better trader.

Disney
NFLX took a big old hit, but to say that NFLX and DIS have alot in common would be disingenuous. Outside of the streaming platform, Disney is a media juggernaut who is able to hedge against market volatility with their brand character sales, theme parks, movies, etc. This one I’m really just looking to play the next day, Thursday morning, and try to get in on the pullback/buyback and IV reduction following earnings for a quick scalp (what I did with TSLA, AMZN, and half did for AMD but failed at).

Twitter
I don’t have a whole lot to say about Twitter, I really don’t know much about the platform. But with an average daily volume of 21M, I do believe that this will present an interesting opportunity to play a scalp the day after earnings.

[bigglyoptionoligist]

Love it, I will be using regular port for these unless we see it work towards the challenge. @Kevin also mentioned Uber would also help be a sentiment indicator for $dash when ER comes up on 2/16.

[tinny_tin_tinman]

This is awesome stuff, thank you for taking the time to put this together.

[SuckyMayor]

Alot of people have less than 25K accounts and adhering to PDT and GFV restrictions is a big concern. Playing earnings by making sympathy plays on these larger companies I think will be a good way to adhere to those restrictions while also minimizing IV crush.

I’d be curious to see the affect this has on DASH because earnings are next week so the IV should be fairly low. Thanks for the callout! I probably won’t play it per se, but I’ll definitely add it to the watchlist.

[SuckyMayor]

Today was a good validation of why having a strategy (not just an intuition) and sticking with it will eventually pay off.

First the callouts on earnings. Been a mixed bag this week. My two big misses were UBER and LYFT, both of these were definitely wrong. However I was right on DIS, XPDE, and NET. That gives me a 60% this week which is not great.

Today I called out that I was taking TWTR puts based on the performance of their earnings. They had lukewarm numbers, they offered a buyback but the hype around that seemed to have fizzled out as quickly as it came on, and generally the market seemed to be in a downtrend. I bought a 38P weekly and managed to get a fill for $0.90. Then it kept running and I began questioning myself and almost changed course and took a loss. Instead I saw it top out around $39 and recognized what appeared to be a head and shoulders on the one minute chart.

So I decided to hold and then witnessed the most boring movement all day. The stock slowly bled all day to finish at just above $37, and around 3:56PM after doing my earnings callout I sold for $1.32, or a $42.00 profit.

With UBER and LYFT, I actually made the wrong call but somehow lucked out and didn’t lose any money on my position. I saw bullish movement on LYFT and bought a 38C ITM call for UBER for $2.92. LYFT’s earnings weren’t great so it took UBER down a bit in the premarket, but it opened ITM and I sold shortly after open for $3.20, a cool profit of $28.00.

Other than that I had some good and bad, all related to things that weren’t really planned, and the lukewarm and sometimes terrifying performance of both was a good reminder of why I shouldn’t be impulsive:

• Bought (1) $4 SENS call last Friday right before close for $0.20, sold on Monday shortly after open for $0.25. Made an awesome profit of $5.00.
• Bought (2) ASTR calls in preparation of the launch for $0.25. Sold them after the failed launch for $0.25. Didn’t do anything there.
• Bought (1) $12.00 AMC put on Friday for $0.09. Figured it would be good for a laugh. A couple times on Monday I had the opportunity to get out even, but instead I held through until Tuesday and the meme-storm took hold. I managed to get out of this at $0.03. I lost $6.00 on this impulse.

All in all that’s a profit of $69, which I think is a sign I shouldn’t trade tomorrow. This puts me at $873.74, an increase of 8.5% on the week and 60.5% since I started tracking this.

[SuckyMayor]

Hi guys! Welcome to a new week of earnings!

This week I will not be planning to trade. I will likely only be inconsistently available in chat throughout the week. I have a wild week of responsibilities in front of me and I won’t have time in the mornings to position myself for anything which is how I would prefer to play it. As such, I’ll be watching the earnings and maybe if I see something beaten down and flagging bullish or vice versa I might make a small gamble-style position, but otherwise I can’t commit to chart watching in the mornings.

However we have some big earnings this week, and I have gotten at least one request for my evening callouts. The ones that I’ll be watching and posting what I see on the trading floor will be:

• Monday - PHX. Gotta love a good penny stock, this may be a great shares opportunity (I really don’t recommend playing options on penny stocks without non-earnings catalysts).
• Tuesday - Roblox and Upstart, I’ll also look at Crocs on Wednesday morning because Squishy
• Wednesday - NVDIA, Cisco and Doordash, I’ll also look to Walmart on Thursday morning
• Thursday - Roku (by popular demand from our favorite VC EmCee @TheMadBeaker), Dropbox, Redfin. I will also look to DraftKings on Friday morning

[SuckyMayor]

I had a break in meetings today and decided to hate myself and look to SPY. Today on SPY I made embarrassingly good gains when that was not my intention at all, it just worked out that way. My positioning was also incredibly irresponsible and I’m not likely to do it again. Part of the problem with a small account is looking at position for the dollar amount rather than the % of your total portfolio. Today it worked out for me, I need to not let that get to my head.

I bought (4) $447C around 11:45 for $0.30. I ended up selling shortly thereafter for $0.34. It was a cool gain of $16.

I laughed and laughed because that was one of the best short term scalps I’ve probably ever had on SPY, but then the market kind of bottomed out as two planes got too close to each other and SPY dipped down to $442. At that time I bought (10) $446C for an average cost of $0.41. As the market started moving back up, the calls eventually went in the money and beyond and I sold them all for an average price of $1.93 around 3PM.

This was irresponsible as that was almost 50% of my portfolio in one FD play that performed significantly better than I thought it would. Call it the itch from not trading all week, if it hadn’t had worked out this would have been a much different story. The result is that my account gained $1,536.00 putting my balance to $2,409.74, an increase of 175.8% on the day.

This is not typical. I do not expect this every day and neither should you. Later on tonight or tomorrow I’ll write up a post about how I already don’t like how much is in this account now and will probably start shuffling some money out.