A perfect week trading earnings ... going into earnings "desert"

Only 5 tradable (more about this below) earnings reports this past week:

All cooperated with the .08 delta earning trade; the account where we were doing only these trades was up this week 2.74%. For the three weeks after we made the last adjustment to the strategy (making sure we never come closer than the .09 delta), we're averaging +6.94% per week ....

We set closing trades to get out with 50% of the profits, but sometimes we get a bonus:

See? We sold this Tiffany spread for 48 cents and put in the order to buy back for 24 cents, but the price had collapsed enough that we got filled for 15 cents just 40 seconds after the market opened on Friday. That's 68.7% of the credit we got instead of just 50%!

Next week is also sparse: 6 tradable earnings reports, as far as we can see right now, then ...

There is a two-week break then until Thursday, April 11, (actually before market opening on April 12, so the trades have to be put on Thursday the 11th) when three big financial companies kick off "spring earnings season:"

Then there are plenty!

So what makes a "tradable earnings report?" 

If you're trading them as wide as we are (once again, about 2x the expected move, 0.08 delta), then that requires a higher stock price (over $25 for sure, preferably above $100) to make sure there's any premium at all in the options way out wide that we want to sell. 

Another requirement is an option that expires quickly after earnings the underlying has to be offering weekly options. Basically we want the price to collapse to 1/2 (or less) of the credit price we get when opening the trade very soon after the results are published.

Mostly, this works for the underlyings we choose. We live on the west coast and don't even get up with the opening of the market at 6:30 PST, instead sleeping in for almost another hour when we get up and look at the Tastyworks  phone app and typically see two or three (or four or six!) of these:

... although debits, since we are closing credit spreads ...

Finally, we've mostly avoided backtesting the past few years as we have enough experience to just test along as we're going, for example on the earnings trades that we're doing that are peforming so well. But we've gotten this friend and fellow trader recommending this backtesting strategy tool Trade Machine Pro that we may try this coming week and we'll report back then.

Thanks and happy trading to you!