An Earnings-Week Playbook Built in Shortcuts

Earnings weeks destroy otherwise calm routines. Names on your watchlist report after the close, guidance lands in a rush, and the useful work is rarely “stare harder at the tape.” It is preparation, alerting, and a consistent post-print checklist. Apple Shortcuts can carry that load if you treat earnings like a recurring project instead of a surprise.

The three jobs of an earnings automation

1. Know what reports when — a daily or weekly pull that intersects your watchlist with the calendar
2. Get interrupted on purpose — a timed alert before the print, not a doomscroll
3. Run the same review after — a checklist Shortcut that opens notes, paper ticket, and next actions

Automate’s Earnings Alarm recipe already covers the interrupt. This playbook wraps the week around it.

Building the calendar spine

Use a time-of-day automation during earnings season (for example early morning and mid-afternoon ET) that:

• Reads your watchlist source (Notes, a sheet, or an API briefing endpoint)
• Filters to symbols with sessions in the next 24–48 hours
• Writes a compact summary to a Notification and optionally to a pinned Note titled “Earnings This Week”

Keep the text scannable: symbol, session (BMO/AMC), and one catalyst line you wrote earlier — not a wall of pasted headlines.

The pre-print alert

Fifteen minutes before a watchlist name reports, a silent or critical alert earns its keep. Critical Alerts require system permission and should be reserved for names you truly refuse to miss; everything else can be a normal notification with a deep link into your checklist Shortcut.

Suggested pre-print contents:

• Symbol and expected session
• Your prewritten thesis in one sentence
• Invalidation level or condition you already decided in calm hours
• Link or tap target to open paper-trading rehearsal — not a live order ticket by default

Post-print checklist Shortcut

After the alert, do not improvise. Run a Shortcut that presents a menu:

The point is identical decisions under stress. Automation enforces the ritual; you still own the judgment.

What not to automate

• Market orders fired from a notification action
• Unbounded symbol lists that page you all night
• Scrapers that violate a data provider’s terms
• “AI summaries” you have not verified against the filing

Shortcuts are excellent at orchestration. They are a poor substitute for reading.

Sharing the playbook with a small team

Export the checklist Shortcut and keep the thesis lines in a shared Note with clear owners. Earnings weeks fail socially when three people page on the same print with three different invalidation rules. Automation should encode the agreed process; chat threads should not reinvent it at 4:05 PM ET.

Wiring it to Automate + Stock Picks

Compose the week from recipes you already trust: Earnings Alarm for the interrupt, Portfolio Briefing for context, Price Ping for the morning-after check. Route market data through the same endpoints Automate documents, and keep practice reps inside Stock Picks so your checklist stays honest when a print is noisy.

Earnings edge is rarely speed alone. It is whether your system still works when the calendar is full.