How to Get Ahead of Wall Street This Earnings Season
Listen to the audio version of this article (generated by AI).
In This Digest:
- Why Micron’s blockbuster earnings failed to send the stock higher
- The Agent Cybersecurity theme just keeps pushing higher – this stock is a buy
- Brazilian stocks are on the move, and this popular TradeSmith tool called the move early
If you own Micron (MU), you might be scratching your head right now…
Last Wednesday, the popular AI memory-chip maker posted the best quarter in its history.
Sales came in at $54.2 billion. That’s nearly five times what it brought in during the same quarter last year. And Micron said it expects even more this quarter – about $61.5 billion.
Both numbers beat Wall Street’s forecasts.
But since then, the stock has barely budged. At this writing, it’s up less than a quarter of a percent since its earnings news.
That’s not what you’d expect. With earnings that good, you’d think the stock would take off. But Andy Swan wasn’t surprised.
Andy heads up our Earnings Season Pass advisory with his brother, Landon.
And as he told former Bloomberg anchor Adam Johnson on a recent episode of our new TradeSmith Unfiltered show, a stock doesn’t trade on how good the last quarter was. It trades on how the last quarter stacks up against what investors already expected.
Analysts’ forecasts are one bar. But the bar that really matters is the one already built into the stock price.
For Micron, that bar was sky-high. The stock soared more than 457% over the past year. By the time the numbers came out, investors had already paid for a blowout.
That’s why Andy and Landon look for a different kind of setup: companies where real-world demand data tells a different story than Wall Street expects.
They built a data engine that tracks what millions of people are doing online. They follow what people search for, which apps they use, and which websites they visit. They even watch niche forums where data center engineers compare notes.
Then their system figures out which signals have been most predictive for each company and uses them to spot changes in demand before earnings. When those signals point to something Wall Street doesn’t see coming, that’s where the Swan brothers find their best trades.
On average, Andy and Landon’s winning trades have given Earnings Season Pass subscribers the chance to double their money in five days or less. Here are some of the standout results:
- Starbucks: 96% in three days.
- American Eagle: 102% in three days.
- Netflix: 112% in four days.
- United Airlines: 113% in four days.
- Crocs: 135% in four days.
- Chipotle: 143% in five days.
- Coinbase: 216% in five days.
- Tesla: 268% in three days.
- Lululemon: 370% in five days.
To learn more about how they find winners like these… and what they’re looking at when the next earnings season kicks off this Sunday, Oct. 11… watch the full conversation here.
Andy and Landon say the earnings season ahead is built for these little-known divergences.
SpaceX’s IPO put roughly $100 billion in Elon Musk’s hands, and SpaceX’s own filing says the first use for that money is expanding its AI infrastructure.
That spending lands on the companies that build the servers, rent the turbines, lay the cable, and supply the cooling.
For a company worth a couple billion dollars, a single contract can mean the best quarter it’s ever had.
The Swans call it “Elon’s October Sweep.”
In their briefing, they explain how they plan to trade it through Earnings Season Pass: in on Monday, out by Friday, starting with their first Earnings Scorecard this Sunday, Oct. 11.
Spots are capped at 500, and today is the last day to claim one. Watch the Swan brothers’ briefing here.
AI agents are one of the top themes on our radar right now…
Agents are the next evolution of popular chatbots like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude.
Instead of just providing information, they’re able to take actions on the internet based on your instructions.
Meta’s Muse agent is one of the most high-profile examples – and we’ve covered here and here how much it’s already disrupting the status quo of how people manage their online life.
But there are a lot of risks associated with AI agents.
Between July 9 and July 13, agents from OpenAI broke containment and hacked into another AI company, Hugging Face, during a training run.
It’s just one of dozens of cases of agents running amok online and doing things that the folks who created them didn’t intend.
The Global X Cybersecurity ETF (BUG) is up nearly 17% since the Hugging Face hack.
Agent Cybersecurity is a powerful theme to follow in this market. And by selecting the best stocks within this theme, you can position yourself to outperform.
And the Quantum Score helps separate the wheat from the chaff.
Regular readers know the Quantum Score is our quantitative ratings system to help find great growth stocks. It rates stocks based on two key factors:
- Fundamentals – including earnings, revenue, and profit margin growth.
- And technicals – factoring institutional buying pressure and technical momentum.
On a 0-100 scale, anything above 75 is a buy signal. And right now, the top-rated stock in the BUG ETF is Palo Alto Networks (PANW):
PANW holds a 90.6 Quantum Score, in the top 10% of all stocks we track, and its Technical Score has pushed higher over the past three months.
That makes it a key company to watch as the Agent Cybersecurity theme continues to play out.
Brazil’s stock market is on the move, and TradeSmith’s systems called the move early…
Brazil held the first round of its presidential election Sunday, and Flávio Bolsonaro unexpectedly finished ahead of incumbent Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva – a result markets read as business-friendly.
The Ibovespa, Brazil’s benchmark index, jumped 7.7% to a record close above 200,000.
And the iShares MSCI Brazil ETF (EWZ), which holds the country’s largest companies, surged more than 12% on the news.
But you didn’t need to be a savvy pollster in Brazilian politics to see this move coming. You could’ve just watched one of TradeSmith’s most popular indicators: Short-Term Health.
Short-Term Health is TradeSmith’s most sensitive trend indicator. It looks at how a stock or index has been trading over its recent history, then flags abnormal moves that signal a shift in momentum. Green means buy. Yellow means caution. Red means sell.
EWZ entered a new Green status back on Sept. 15, three weeks before the big push we saw on Monday.
You’ll note the last time EWZ flashed a new Green signal out of a previous Red was on March 24, 2025. From that Green signal to its Red signal earlier this year, EWZ returned more than 38%.
Keep an eye on Brazilian stocks over the coming weeks. The Brazilian election is heading to a runoff, and a Bolsonaro victory could point to more gains in the country’s stock market.
To building wealth beyond measure,
Michael Salvatore
Editor, TradeSmith Daily