Isn't this a great picture? The folks over at Earnings Whispers do their best to cater to a broad audience but there are so many things wrong with thinking like the masses.

As someone who has traded earnings exclusively for many years, it bothers me when I see posts like this. Allow me to break it down:

 

1. None of these earnings dates are adjusted for after-market announcements, making a lot of the data points incorrect.

I always adjust AMC announcements to the next day because that is the first opportunity for traders to react.

If you don't adjust your scanner to account for this, you're missing a LOT of opportunities. 1,655 just this quarter to be exact

 

2. The person who put this graphic together seems to think the top gainer this quarter was $BBBY but there were actually 75 stocks that had higher gains.

Don't limit yourself to "famous" stocks. If you're using earnings as a momentum catalyst, the name of the company doesn't matter.

 

3. This graphic has the largest post-earnings change as 71%, yet according to my data, the largest change was -768%. They've omitted 126 stocks that had larger moves than +/-71%. A good trade on any one of those stocks could make your entire year.

 

How are you supposed to exponentially grow an account when you're exposing yourself to less than 50% of the stocks in your universe and 1% of the available profit?