A Special Situations Invitation
No coin flips and no math to solve. Just one rule from 1853 that’s already 14 and 3 in 2026… And your chance to get the next four. Doors close Tuesday at midnight ET.
You never had a chance.
When earnings drop, the market moves billions of dollars in milliseconds. High-frequency firms with servers three feet from the exchange execute in 47 microseconds.
You?
You're sitting at home with a mouse and a dream.
By the time you read the headline, parse the numbers and place your order, institutional money has taken its profit and gone. Over $2.9 trillion flooded into seven stocks last earnings season. None of it was waiting for you.
So get faster. Better data, better fills, get positioned before the print instead of chasing it after.
It wouldn't have saved you.
Forbes
“Earnings Season Is Broken”
Wednesday night, Alphabet reported. Revenue beat. Google Cloud grew 82%. A monster quarter by any measure you'd normally use. The stock fell 7% the next day.
Tesla reported the same night. Record revenue, record deliveries, the most cars they've ever moved in a second quarter. It dropped 14.5% and took $140 billion down with it.
Netflix came in line last week and fell 8%. GE Aerospace beat on earnings, beat on revenue, raised guidance for the whole year, and still dropped 4%.
You read the quarter right. You picked the company right. And you got run over anyway.
Los Angeles Times
“the best earnings season in years isn’t helping stocks rise”
Not one of those was a speed problem. Those traders had the full report, the whole call, and the correct read on the business. It made no difference.
So if you can't win on earnings day, what do you do?
Mark Sebastian's answer is the exact opposite of what amateurs do. It has nothing to do with being faster, and nothing to do with reading the quarter better than the desk on the other side of your trade.
It comes from a formula a French statistician published in 1853, the same math an insurance company uses to price a policy it can't afford to get wrong.
He has run it 17 times on 2026 earnings reports. Fourteen of them made money. The winners ran from 20% to 243%, including 242.86% on Tesla in two days and 157.81% on Exxon in four.
Each one takes a single order to put on. No screens, no tape watching, no reacting in the moment.
And there are four more sitting on his board right now. He places all four live on Friday morning, the day after Apple reports.
It works because of something nobody ever explains to retail traders.
It isn't that good news gets punished. Two days before Alphabet, 3M beat and jumped 7%. Same kind of quarter, opposite reaction. If there were a rule you'd flip your position and collect. There's no rule. Nothing tells you which one you're about to get, and that is a bet with a fee attached, not a trade.
Pros don't trade the unknown
Not timidity. There's no edge in a guess, and paying a premium for the privilege of guessing is the worst trade on the board. So professionals go looking for the edge somewhere else.
There's one sitting in the option price itself, in plain sight, that almost nobody outside the pits ever learns to see.
The first one is ordinary. It's what time costs. The everyday drift of a stock across the days it has left.
J.P. Morgan
“options are pricing above-average earnings volatility”
The second one is the event. One report. One date. Priced in advance, months before it happens, and stacked right on top of the first.
Here's the part that ruins retail traders: the second price dies the instant the report hits. Doesn't matter whether the stock rips or craters. The thing it was charging for already happened, so it's gone.
One option. Two prices.
Buy before the print and you pay for both. The event charge disappears overnight whether you were right or not. That's how traders call the quarter perfectly and still lose money.
So the question stops being which way will it go. It becomes this. How do you buy the first price without paying for the second?
Somebody worked that out a long time ago. He just wasn't thinking about stocks.
In 1853, a French statistician named Irénée-Jules Bienaymé published a formula for taking a single lump of risk and splitting it into its separate parts.
Actuaries have used it ever since.
It's how an insurer separates the risk of a house fire from the risk of a flood, prices each one on its own, and knows exactly what it's charging for what.
Mark saw the same structure sitting in an option chain. A stock heading into earnings isn't carrying one risk. It's carrying two: the ordinary drift of any week it trades, and one specific night nobody can handicap.
Price them separately, the way an actuary would, and something obvious falls out. You don't have to buy both.
Most traders never get there. They look at an option, decide it's expensive or it's cheap, and buy it or they don't. Mark looks at the same option and sees two line items, one of which is a bill for a coin flip he has no intention of taking.
He doesn't trade the report. Never has.
He waits for the event charge to bleed out of the options.
That's the trigger. Not a date on a calendar, a condition in the market. Before a report, options carry a premium for something nobody can handicap. The second the report lands, that premium starts draining. The crowd moves on, volume falls out of the stock, and options that were priced for chaos get marked down hard.
Same company. Same news. A fraction of the price.
Usually that takes less than a week. Sometimes longer. Mark doesn't rush it and he doesn't force it. If the premium hasn't come out, there's no trade, and he'll sit on his hands until there is.
And by the time it does come out, he knows something nobody knew on report night. Which way the thing is actually headed. The analysts have published their revised numbers. The gap has filled, or it hasn't. The trend is sitting right there on the chart where anyone can read it.
So he buys the cheap side of a move that's already underway, then waits for volume to come back, because it always does. That's his exit.
Mark spent twenty years as a market maker on the CBOE floor in Chicago, and he's trained professional traders at Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan and Susquehanna. Reading order flow is the job. Knowing when the chaos has cleared and the real setup has appeared is the whole skill.
The waiting is Mark's job. Yours takes about ninety seconds.
The alert arrives at a set time with the ticker, the strike, the expiration and the price you should pay. You place one order. Then you go back to your day until the second alert tells you to close it.
And you don't need a big account. Most of these take a few hundred dollars to put on, not hedge fund money. The Exxon calls below cost $3.20 a contract. The Tesla calls cost $7.00.
The most you can lose on one is what you paid for it. That number is fixed before you place the order, and it can't grow while you're not looking.
Here's what one actually looks like when it lands.
Member alert · sent May 11, 2026
Buy to open
XOM May 29 $150 Calls
Limit $3.20 or less. Do not chase.
Exxon reported May 1 and slid for five straight sessions. The event premium is out and the selling has exhausted itself. Volume is back to normal and the stock turned today.
Standard position. Do not oversize this.
I'll send a second alert. Watch for volume coming back into the name. That's the signal, not a price target.
That's the whole thing. One order, placed once, at a price you're told not to exceed. Four sessions later the second alert went out at $8.25.
Which raises the fair question. When he does pull the trigger, what actually happens?
Same pattern both times. Watch it repeat.
May 15 $405 calls · reported April 22 · entered May 6 · closed May 8
Look at what he actually bought. Tesla was sitting at $398.73 and the strike was $405, so the stock had to climb before those calls were worth anything at all at expiration. Nine days on the clock. Which means the entire $7.00 was the cost of time and direction, with no event charge left inside it.
That's the 1853 split, sitting in a single fill. He waited two weeks for the event charge to disappear, then still refused to pay the asking price for what was left.
May 29 $150 calls · reported May 1 · entered May 11 · closed May 15
Different sector, different direction, same three moves. Let the report pass, let the event charge drain, buy what everyone else abandoned.
Two trades, one method, no guessing at a report. One order each.
Three members, one alert, same setup
"In at $1.92, out at $7.50."
Shane · +291%"In at $1.83, out at $7.15."
SueC · +291%"In at $1.85, out at $5.00."
FloridaAce · +170%Three members on the same SQQQ alert, all closed inside a day, all within pennies of each other on the entry. That's what a followable trade looks like.
But here's the thing about the trades you're getting Friday. They aren't Mark's because he owns the place. He had to win them.
Every week, five of us sit down behind a closed door. Mark Sebastian, Andrew Giovinazzi, Tim Colby, Licia Leslie and Hans Albrecht. Between us that's nearly 100 years on the trading floor, and not one of us looks at the market the same way.
Everybody brings one idea. Their single best special situation for the week ahead. Then we go at it.
Andrew usually opens, because he's always the one who found something broken. He's been on the CBOE floor since 1991, where he built one of the top market-maker posts in the pits. He spends his week hunting the rare moments when the market forgets to charge properly for risk. When Andrew says the options are being given away, the room listens.
Tim comes at it from thirty thousand feet. Fifteen years on the AMEX and CBOE floors, then a long run at his own macro portfolio, which grew past $200 million with 75% profitable months and not a single losing year. He takes Andrew's idea and asks whether it survives contact with the wider world.
Licia doesn't argue. She pulls up a chart. A former CBOE member who ran her own independent trading group, she made her money in the pit taking the other side of institutional orders before retail knew what had hit them. She won't act on one signal, ever, so when she says several have lined up and they're all pointing the same way, that carries weight the rest of us have learned not to dismiss.
Hans was a floor market maker who went on to run an options and equity fund worth more than $1 billion. He charges $800 an hour to coach traders now. He's often looking at the same name as everyone else in the room and seeing a completely different trade inside it.
"By far the most valuable addition to Option Pit we have ever had."
Ed G, Option Pit member, on HansFive ideas walk in. One walks out.
That trader takes it live the following week, and everybody else stands down.
One idea doesn't always mean one ticker. Right now Mark's is four names, because four of them hit the same setup inside the same window. A quiet week never does that. An earnings calendar does.
This round Mark won it, because the calendar handed him the richest setup on the board. Next week it might be Andrew, with an option so mispriced he can barely say it with a straight face. Or Tim, on something the macro picture cracked open. Or Licia, reading a setup the rest of us walked straight past. Or Hans.
So what you're buying isn't one trader's opinion. It's the single idea that survived four other specialists, and a century of floor scar tissue, trying to tear it apart.
Not a highlight reel. This is the whole strategy, separated out from everything else the desk does, winners and losers on the same page. Same door Friday's four come from.
| Trade | Held | Magnitude | Result |
|---|---|---|---|
| TSLA | 2 days | +242.86% | |
| XOM | 4 days | +157.81% | |
| GE | 6 days | +131.48% | |
| NTGR | 17 days | +125.00% | |
| GLW | 5 days | +91.46% | |
| PWR | 11 days | +83.23% | |
| HPE | 18 days | +75.00% | |
| AVAV | 23 hours | +61.29% | |
| KMI | 13 days | +59.09% | |
| MSFT | 9 days | +55.83% | |
| NOW | 4 days | +34.38% | |
| SPGI | 2 days | +22.22% | |
| CBOE | 5 days | +21.43% | |
| ADP | 19 days | +20.00% | |
| SBUX | 26 days | −100.00% | |
| HOOD | 26 days | −100.00% | |
| SMCI | 86 days | −100.00% |
Fourteen of seventeen made money. The winners ran from 20% to 243%. Nine of them closed inside a week.
Now look at the bottom three. When one of these goes wrong it goes to zero, because the most you can ever lose is the premium you paid for the option. Nobody calls you for more. Nothing keeps bleeding while you're not watching.
That's the whole trade-off. A small, fixed, known loss on the ones that miss, in exchange for the kind of number sitting at the top of that table on the ones that hit.
We don't win them all. Nobody does. Anyone who tells you otherwise is selling you something worse than a losing trade.
"Buying back NBIS for 1.50 was a one-week 79% gain. Not too shabby for Hans!!"
Gerry, Special Situations member"Closed my AAPL trade for over a 674% return."
Goss2Go, Special Situations memberEverything you've read so far is one strategy inside a bigger service.
A special situation is any moment when something forces a stock to move for a reason that has nothing to do with what the company is worth. A corporate event with a date attached, a mechanical repricing, a ruling nobody's options have caught up to yet. Wall Street front runs these. Retail never sees them coming.
Post-earnings drift is the door we're standing in this month, because the calendar handed it to us. There are three more.
Every one of them creates a pricing gap that closes fast. Every one of them gets the same treatment: five traders in a room, one idea survives, one order per trade to put it on.
Post-earnings is 17 of them. Here's the whole 2026 book.
Twelve of those came through the other three doors. A few of them:
| Trade | Held | Magnitude | Result |
|---|---|---|---|
| AMZN | 7 days | +150.00% | |
| XOM | 6 days | +92.11% | |
| PG | 6 days | +78.79% | |
| HOOD | 6 days | +50.00% | |
| GLD | 27 days | +43.48% | |
| XLE | 11 days | +29.88% | |
| GOOGL | 8 days | +28.36% | |
| GDX | 27 days | +26.98% |
Gold. Energy. Bitcoin. A consumer staple. An oil ETF that went to zero. None of them earnings plays, all of them the same hunt for a price that stopped matching the risk.
Six losses out of twenty-nine. We print them because a track record without losses isn't a track record. It's a brochure.
Which is the honest reason to join for a year instead of a week. You are not buying one trade. You are buying a book of them, and a book is the only thing a 79% win rate can actually pay off in.
"In one day I've made the cost of Special Situations."
Karen S., Special Situations memberEarnings season is already running. The banks kicked it off mid-July. Alphabet and Tesla reported on the 22nd. Netflix and GE Aerospace are behind us.
Which means Mark's board is already full. He has four candidates on it right now. Four names that reported, got abandoned by the crowd, and are sitting in the window where the event charge has drained and the direction is readable.
He isn't sending them yet, and the reason is the whole strategy in one decision. Apple reports Thursday night. When Apple moves, it takes the tape with it. Putting on four positions in front of that is paying for the one thing this formula exists to refuse to pay for. So Mark waits for it to clear.
Friday at 11:30 AM Eastern, he goes live and places all four. The alerts go out by email during the session with the ticker, the strike, the expiration and the limit price. If you're at work, they're already in your inbox when you get there, and the replay is waiting.
Before that, two things land that nobody outside the membership sees.
Wednesday morning, hours before Microsoft and Meta report that night, Mark sends members an exclusive pre-earnings report on what he's watching in the print and what it does to the setup. Thursday morning, ahead of Amazon and Apple, he sends the second one.
Neither one goes on the website. Neither one goes to the free list. They go out once, to members, and that's the end of it.
Which puts your deadline on Tuesday at midnight Eastern. In by then and the first report hits your inbox Wednesday morning, at nineteen dollars for the month. After midnight the first month goes back to $49, the reports are gone, and you find out what Mark bought on Friday by reading about it later.
Four in one session is not what a normal week looks like here. Three to five in a month is normal. This is what an earnings calendar does to the board, and it's the whole reason to be in for this stretch rather than a quiet one.
Business Insider
“stocks have been seeing wild post-earnings swings”
Then it keeps coming. Microsoft and Meta go July 29. Apple and Amazon follow on the 30th. More than 150 S&P 500 companies are due next week alone, and every one of them starts the same clock: the print lands, the crowd trades it, the crowd leaves, the volume drains, the options get marked down. Nvidia doesn't report until late August, which stretches the runway further still.
By the time this season wraps up, Mark expects four to six more of these on top of the ones already on his board.
And it isn't only earnings converging right now. The Fed decides rates on July 29, the same afternoon Microsoft and Meta report. Major earnings rolling in, a Fed meeting on the books, and the biggest reporting week of the year all landing inside eight days.
This is the most target-rich stretch the desk has seen all year.
That's the run you're getting on. Not one trade on one Friday.
The $19 door closes and the first report goes out in
After that the first month is $49
"NVDA: In at $4.84, out at $8.10. Thanks Mark."
Morgan, Special Situations memberYour Seat
You get every trade the room picks. Entry, exit, position size, and the reasoning behind it, in plain English, from the trader who won that week.
First month
$49$19
Then $49/month · Cancel anytime
The $19 first month ends Tuesday at midnight ET
Why we drop the first month to nineteen dollars.
Because the fastest way to earn your trust is to let you watch us work.
In your first month you'll meet all five of us. You'll sit in on the screen shares and watch the orders get placed. You'll read the reasoning behind every alert before the trade resolves, so you can judge the thinking and not just the outcome. And you'll see for yourself what these positions pay.
We'd rather you decide on evidence than on a sales page. Nineteen dollars removes the reason to say no.
Then run the math yourself. Mark's Exxon calls cost $3.20 a contract and closed at $8.25 four sessions later. Ten of those is a $505 gain on a $320 position, which covers the better part of a year of membership on a single trade.
Follow the trades. Watch the live sessions. See the dashboard. If this isn't the edge you've been looking for, get every penny back inside 14 days. No questions. No hassle. Call 888-872-3301 or email support@optionpit.com.
No. The trades are simple and the weekly sessions walk through every step as it happens. Beginners follow along. Pros get the precision they want.
Not much. Most trades take a few hundred dollars to put on, and your downside is capped at what you paid for the position. That number is set before you enter.
No. Every trade arrives by text and email with the exact entry, and every one has a set exit, so you know the plan before you act. Friday's four go out during the live session, so if you're at your desk job the alerts are sitting in your inbox and the replay is there when you get home. Mark's waiting is the hard part and he does it for you.
Real-time text and email alerts the moment the room commits. Plus a live dashboard showing every open trade and where it stands.
Three to five in a normal month. Earnings season is not a normal month. When 150 companies report inside a week, more names clear the bar, which is why four are going out in a single session. The standard stays where it is. The count moves with the calendar.
Friday at 11:30 AM Eastern. Mark goes live and places all four, and the alerts are emailed during the session. Your deadline to be in is Tuesday at midnight, because that's when the $19 first month ends and the pre-earnings reports start going out.
Two of them, members only. The first lands Wednesday morning, before Microsoft and Meta report that night. The second lands Thursday morning, before Amazon and Apple. They don't go on the site and we don't send them twice. Not a member by Tuesday midnight, you don't get them.
Mark expects four to six more post-earnings setups before this season closes out, and the desk hunts splits, mergers and regulatory situations all year. Friday is the next batch, not the last one. What you don't get back is the $19 month or the two reports.
You're covered by the 14-day money-back guarantee and you can cancel anytime.
Next week, four of the biggest companies on earth report. Microsoft and Meta on the 29th, Apple and Amazon on the 30th. You'll read the headlines. Some will beat and fall. Some will miss and rally. And when the dust settles you'll know exactly what you knew this morning, which is that you had no way of telling which was which.
Or you sit the guess out entirely.
You let the crowd trade the report. You let the volume drain out. You let the options go on sale. And when the event charge is gone and the direction is sitting on the chart for anyone to read, you place one order on the cheap side of a move that's already underway.
That's a formula from 1853, five floor traders, and one trade a week that has to beat four others to reach you.
Nineteen dollars. Fourteen days to change your mind.
Mark has four post-earnings candidates on his board right now. He places all four live Friday at 11:30 AM Eastern, the morning after Apple reports, with the alerts emailed during the session and a replay if you can't make it. Before that, two exclusive pre-earnings reports go out to members only, Wednesday and Thursday. Neither one gets posted anywhere.
Your deadline is Tuesday at midnight. After that the first month is $49 and the reports are already gone.
Nineteen dollars for the first month. Fourteen days to change your mind, and every cent back if you decide it isn't for you.
Microsoft, Meta, Apple and Amazon all report inside the next eight days. Every one of them starts the same clock.