Four Seconds from Signal to Trade
BY LANDON SWAN, FOUNDER, LIKEFOLIO
Earlier this week, after months of work with the TradeSmith engineers, my brother Andy and I finally put our newest earnings trading system to the test. Andy zeroed in on Chewy (CHWY) – a stock we’d just closed for a 97% win two days earlier – and clicked a single button.
The system scanned every available trade setup in real time… found the best one… sized it to his account… and displayed the full trade setup: what to buy, what to sell, and all the risks involved.
The whole thing took about four seconds.
He looked at me and said: “I can’t tell you how excited this makes me.”
Andy and I have been trading earnings for more than 40 years combined.
We’ve recommended more than 1,800 earnings trades to our subscribers, each backed by our consumer data engine, LikeFolio.
And on average – counting winners and losers – these trades produced a gain of 14.8%.
Tonight, a new season kicks off. And now, armed with this new software upgrade, we’re more ready than ever.
By the end of today’s issue, you’ll learn how you can get your hands on it… and trade an earnings report with an average winning gain of 33% that’s coming up this week.
But first, let me show you what our earnings strategy is and why it works.
Recommended Link
Log into our New $5,000 Forecast Calendar
Today, we’re sharing a “forecast calendar” for 2026. It shows you when the biggest stock jumps could occur this year – to the day – with an 83% backtested accuracy. Last year alone, you could have doubled your money 13 times with it across our work. We urge you to use it by April 15 to prepare for a colossal event coming to stocks.
The Social Edge in Trading Earnings
Four times a year, every public company reports its numbers – and stock moves around those reports can be enormous.
Research published in the Journal of Financial Economics has shown that price swings around earnings can run up to 30 times larger than average daily moves.
Andy and I have spent over two decades trading earnings season, using consumer demand signals to read which way a stock is likely to move before a single number hits.
We do this with our LikeFolio Data Engine – a system we built over two decades that tracks millions of data points across social media posts, web traffic, app downloads, and search queries every single day.
It measures what consumers are actually doing – buying, browsing, talking about brands online – and distills all of that activity into a clear read on whether demand for a company’s products is rising or falling.
When that consumer signal diverges from where a stock is trading heading into earnings, it’s often a sign the market has it wrong. That’s the edge we trade on.
But knowing which way a stock will move is only half the battle. To profit from earnings, you also need to act fast – and you need the right kind of trade.
Why We Use Options – and Why That Used to Be the Hard Part
When a stock reports earnings, it can swing 5%, 10%, even 20% in a single session. If you’re trading the stock itself, you’re exposed to the full force of that move in either direction.
But with a properly structured options trade, you know your maximum loss before you ever click “buy.”
You also don’t need to be right about how much the stock moves – just the direction.
And because options are cheaper to enter than buying shares outright, you can spread your capital across multiple earnings trades each week instead of going all in on a single stock.
Still, even for a veteran trader, turning an earnings signal into a live options trade was cumbersome.
Our consumer demand data told you which direction a stock would move. Our strategy told you what type of trade to place.
But then you’d dig through an options chain, run the sizing math in your head, structure the trade manually, and enter everything into your brokerage – all while the market was moving.
Each step is a chance to make a mistake. And during earnings season, mistakes are expensive.
Our new Earnings Season Passdashboard was built to solve exactly that – bringing everything an investor needs into one place, so nothing gets lost in translation between the signal and the trade.
Let me show you how it works…
From Signal to Trade in Four Seconds
Let’s say Netflix (NFLX) – the first major name of this earnings season, reporting Thursday, April 16 – shows up on our Scorecard with a strong directional signal.
In the old world, you’d open the Scorecard, note the signal, then leave the platform entirely.
You’d pull up your brokerage, search through Netflix’s options chain, find the right strike prices, calculate your position size, build the spread by hand, double-check the math, and place the order.
That process could take 10 to 15 minutes if you knew what you were doing – longer if you didn’t.
Now, you click a button and the system does the rest. It scans every available option in real time, finds the best spread, sizes the position to your account, and shows you exactly what to pay, what you stand to gain, and where you’re protected on the downside.
When you’re ready, you copy the trade setup and paste it directly into your brokerage.
Andy put it best: “Now I can just click a button and execute with confidence.” Coming from someone who’s built thousands of these trades by hand, that’s not a small thing.
Knowing When to Trust the Signal
Speed is one thing, but knowing which trade to pick is another.
Not every stock behaves the same. Some names line up cleanly with our data – consumer-facing brands whose customers talk openly online about what they’re buying, what they love, and what they’re ditching.
Others are harder to call – driven by things our data doesn’t weigh as heavily, like currency swings or management guidance.
For years, the only way to know the distinction was experience. Now it’s built into the dashboard.
In the new Earnings Scorecard, every stock we cover gets a historical performance score based on how predictive our signals have actually been over time.
Hover over it and you see the full picture: total trades, wins, losses, and whether there’s a streak running.
That’s what shows us that when we’ve been right on NFLX in the past, it’s produced a 33% gain on the options trade our system sets up.
Or take Oxford Industries (OXM) – the company behind brands like Tommy Bahama and Lilly Pulitzer. That stock has produced five wins in a row.
When consumers talk about buying a new Lilly dress or a Tommy shirt, that purchase intent shows up in our data long before it shows up in a quarterly report – exactly the kind of signal our system is built to catch across more than 500 million data points every day.
Or take Chewy – the online pet retailer whose customers are famously vocal about every purchase, every subscription box, every bag of kibble.
That loyalty shows up in our data consistently, which is why Chewy was sitting at a 71% historical win rate before our most recent 97% win.
Now compare that to a stock where the history is thinner or less consistent. You don’t have to guess. You can just pass.
How You Can Take Advantage
Every week this earnings season – starting tonight at 7:00 p.m. Eastern– the dashboard updates with a fresh Scorecard.
Members will see every company reporting in the days ahead, scored and ranked before they step up to report, with the trade already there to build the moment you’re ready to act.
Our members aren’t just reacting to earnings – they’re positioned ahead of them.
Netflix (NFLX) is up on Thursday – the first major report of the season. When the Scorecard drops tonight, Earnings Season Pass members will already know which way we think Netflix moves, why we think that, and exactly how to structure the trade – days before the company reports a single number.
Go here now to make sure tonight’s Scorecard lands in your TradeSmith account at 7 p.m. Eastern – right on time for Week 1.
Cheers,
Landon Swan
Founder, LikeFolio
Retirees and near-retirees need to worry more about Stealth Taxes than regular income taxes. 
Robert C. Carlson is the author of the books The New Rules of Retirementand Retirement Tax Guide, editor and investment director of the popular retirement newsletter, Retirement Watch, and editor of the free weekly e-letter, Retirement Watch Weekly. Bob is a frequent speaker at investment conferences around the country, and you can also hear Bob as a featured guest on nationally-syndicated radio shows, such as The Retirement Hour, Dateline Washington, Family News in Focus, The Michael Reagan Show, Money Matters and The Stock Doctor.
