Updates on Costco and Joy Global Earnings Plays

Last week I wrote two Seeking Alpha articles on earnings plays – How To Play The Costco Earnings Announcement and How To Play Joy Global’s Earnings Announcement.  I expected that Costco would fall after earnings because expectations were unusually high and that JOY would move higher because expectations were quite low.

I was right on with the COST call and our positions gained 16.6% after commissions for the week.  JOY fell marginally, less than $.50 and we gained 7.8%.

Update on the Costco trade (submitted as a comment after the Costco article). Today before the open, Costco announced earnings of $1.04 which beat estimates of $1.02 but fell short of the $1.06 whisper number. The stock is now trading just under $113 compared to just under $115 when I wrote this article so any potential buyer of the stock would have done well to heed my advice and wait until after the announcement to buy shares (Note: a day later fell to below $110).

The diagonal option spread that I suggested was sold in our Terry’s Tips portfolio for a credit of $.84. That meant for anyone buying 5 spreads, your investment would have been the $2500 maintenance requirement less $420 received from the sale, or $2080. Today we sold the spread for a debit of $.10, making $.74 per spread. After paying commissions of $25, the net gain on 5 spreads was $345, or 16.6% on the investment. This was the 11th consecutive successful earnings trade we have made using our Expectation Model.

Note: In the actual Terry’s Tips portfolio where the Costco trade was made, we also placed a calendar spread to reduce our risk (in case we were wrong about Costco falling after the announcement).  This spread lost money and reduced our gain to 9.6% after commissions.

In JOY there were 4 July-13 – May5-13 calendar spreads. In our actual account at thinkorswim, here are the numbers for what we paid for these spreads and what we sold them for: 52.5 strike (cost $1.35 sold for $1.20), 55 strike (cost $1.55 sold for $2.38), 57.5 strike (cost $1.50 sold for $1.61), and 60 strike (cost $1.19 sold for $1.00). We lost money on 2 spreads but gained on 2 others, and enjoyed one big gain. The total cost of our investment was $2236 and our net gain after paying $65 in commissions was $175, or 7.8% on our investment.

While this was quite a bit lower than the returns we made on the earlier 11 investments that resulted in gains averaging about 19% (without a single loss), most people would be happy with 7.8% for a single week after commissions. 

These two profitable earnings trades made it 12 consecutive gainers for this portfolio.
The odds of making 12 successful profitable trades without a single loss is comparable to flipping a coin and getting heads 12 times in a row. The odds of that happening are one out of 4096 times. Either I have been incredibly lucky or maybe there is some merit in the Expectations Model I have developed. The future will tell. 

We are not making any earnings-related trades this week because only one company we are following (they must have weekly options and be trading over $20) reports this week, and our expectations model could not determine whether expectations were unusually high or low.