Hi, I’m Ryan Schaefer — the Earnings Analyst.

My trading journey began during my last semester of college in 2005. After paying my final tuition bill, I had $3,000 left from my college fund. Feeling rich, I opened an Ameritrade account and bought shares of Sirius Satellite Radio. The stock jumped on good news, and I quickly made $500. Trading felt effortless—until it wasn’t. Suddenly, great news started sending the stock down, and I lost not only my gains but more.

Curious—and more than a little obsessed—I started searching for trading education. That’s when I found a DVD called Guerilla Trading by Greg Capra. It fascinated me, but I didn’t yet have the tools to trade that way, so I put it aside for a few years.

Four years later, I rediscovered that DVD and learned Capra was hosting a live trading event in Las Vegas. I went, watched him trade live, and knew instantly: that’s what I wanted to do. I bought his education package and dove in.

For the next five years, trading became my life. My goal was simple—quit my job in the Idaho desert and trade full-time. I studied relentlessly, spent about $15,000 on training through Pristine Trading, and experimented with every style: day trading, swing trading, core trading. After a mentorship in Chicago, my mentor told me I had one of the best chances he’d seen to make it as a professional trader.

Then life shifted. My job eliminated its evening shift, which meant I could no longer trade during the day. My activity slowed to a crawl, and day trading became impossible. After years of grinding, I’d hit a wall—but part of me was relieved. Trading all day and working all night had left me completely burned out.

Still craving freedom, I found another path. I landed a remote analyst job in a nearby ski town—closer to the lifestyle I wanted, closer to my friends, and flexible enough to stay involved in the markets. I spent eight years there sharpening my analytical skills and becoming an Excel super user and developer.

Eventually, the spark faded in that job, and the trading itch returned. I built a new setup and dove back in—gaps, day trades, swings, and especially earnings.

Combining my love of data with my passion for trading, I built a proprietary system to trade every stock in the S&P 500 into earnings. Over time, I refined the universe—removing stocks that rarely gap, like REITs and utilities, and adding roughly a hundred more names outside the index. The analytics framework I built tracks it all: entries, exits, sector performance, beats and misses, average gap sizes, individual stock trends, overall P&L, and more.

My first live earnings season returned 17%. The next two brought gains of 4% and 5%. Modest, but steady—and all during the turbulence of the Liberation Day tariffs.

Trading earnings so closely gave me deeper insight into both fundamentals and market psychology. Watching how stocks reacted to reports revealed the market’s true emotions—confidence, fear, and sometimes pure irrationality. Everyone knows a stock can drop on “good” earnings or rise on “bad” ones, but I began to see why. That understanding led to secondary trades—often through options—capitalizing on sentiment shifts and market misreads that appear only when you’re immersed in dozens of earnings events at once.

Today, I’m a trader and earnings analyst. This site shares my research, insights, and the performance of my earnings strategies since inception.

If you’re interested in earnings analysis or in learning how to trade earnings with an analytical edge, you’re in the right place.