The ones that fill are the weak ones.
A Mag 7 stock gaps up on earnings and it feels like the move already happened without you.
We tested whether you actually get a second chance at it. We looked at every earnings gap up of 5% or more in AAPL, MSFT, GOOGL, AMZN, META, NVDA and TSLA since August 2016. A 1% gap is not a move you missed, so it does not count. That gave us 76 cases, with a median gap of 8%.
33 of the 76 traded all the way back to the pre-report closing price, as if the earnings move never happened. Median wait was 13 sessions.
Take the 33 that came back to the pre-report price. Buy each one there, hold it, and sell at the close the day before the next earnings report, so you are never holding through the next gap.
The median trade returned +4.1% and the average +7.4%. 21 of the 33 made money. The best was TSLA in April 2020 at +98.9% and the worst was TSLA in January 2025 at −38.8%.
Compare it against the obvious alternative: buying the morning after the report and not waiting at all for the earnings gap to fill.
That produces a median return of +11.7%, with 76% profitable. Waiting for the price to come back only gets you +4.1% and 64% profitable.
The reason is that the ones that never filled their earnings gap were the strong ones, and waiting for the gap to fill filters those out.
You cannot know in advance which ones will fill, and that is the point. The choice you actually have on the day is chase or wait, and over ten years chasing won.
Of the 76 Mag 7 earnings gap ups of 5% or more since August 2016, 33 traded back down to the pre-report price. That is 43%. The median wait was 13 sessions.
If you bought those 33 at the fill price and sold at the close before the next report, the median return was 4.1% and the average was 7.4%. 21 of the 33 made money.
Two TSLA trades drive most of the average. The April 2020 trade returned 98.9%. The January 2025 trade lost 38.8%. Take both out and the average drops to 6.0%. The median does not change.
If instead you bought all 76 the morning after the report, at the close of the gap day, the median return was 11.7% and 76% of the trades made money. Waiting for the fill cost about 7.5 points of median return per trade. The gaps that come back tend to be the weaker ones. We would not wait.
TradeIntel’s Earnings Analyzer shows the historical gap and what followed it, report by report, for any stock you are watching.
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