The original poster is not discussing any particular company’s fundamentals, but rather a short-dated options experiment around four earnings events: META, MSFT, GOOG, and ROKU. The core purpose is to show that buying a single-leg weekly or near-0DTE call/put before earnings often has a lower win rate than the intuitive “coin flip on direction” assumption. The approach was to buy a call and a put with the same expiration and strike the day before earnings, i.e. a long straddle, then exit after earnings, using actual P&L to demonstrate how elevated pre-earnings implied volatility, post-earnings IV crush, and theta decay can consume the gains from a correct directional call. The poster says that under Black-Scholes or a similar options-pricing framework, META needed an approximately +/- 5.7% move, MSFT approximately +/- 6.2%, GOOG approximately +/- 7.1%, and ROKU approximately +/- 14.3% for the straddle to cover the option cost and post-earnings volatility compression. Therefore, simply “getting the direction right” is not enough; the stock price must exceed the implied move already priced in by the options market. The image is a Robinhood realized options P&L screenshot showing an MSFT 425 put gaining $940 and an MSFT 425 call losing $1,328, for an MSFT combined net loss of about $388; a GOOG 350 call gaining $970 and a GOOG 350 put expiring worthless for a $960 loss, leaving the combination nearly flat; a META 672.5 call losing $2,490 and a META 672.5 put gaining $4,055, for a combined net gain of about $1,565; and a ROKU 117 call losing $159 and a ROKU 117 put losing $405, with both legs losing and a net loss of about $564. The four groups add up to roughly a $623 gain, close to the poster’s statement that the overall result was “about breakeven,” though this may not include commissions, bid-ask spreads, and execution slippage. The poster’s conclusion is that before trading earnings options, one should first look at the Greeks, option prices, implied volatility, and breakeven points, rather than betting on weeklies purely based on earnings direction. If the calculated required move is clearly unrealistic, one may lose money even after guessing the direction correctly. The implicit assumptions are that option prices have reflected expected market volatility relatively efficiently, that IV falls quickly after earnings, and that time-value decay is significant in short-dated options. The biggest weaknesses are that the sample contains only four events, and the results are highly affected by specific entry and exit prices, bid-ask spreads, earnings release timing, exit timing, and strike selection. The poster’s use of the “move required by Black-Scholes” as a decision framework may also be oversimplified, because actual option prices are affected by the volatility surface, skew, liquidity, and the distribution of event volatility, not just a single formula. In addition, this experiment cannot prove that all earnings option buyers lose money over the long run; it only shows that in high-IV, short-dated earnings trades, traders must overcome implied volatility pricing in addition to being right on direction.