Here's just some friendly advice. Take it with a grain of salt from a previous Web 1.0 web company employee that had a lot of unvested and vested stock grants...
If you have a lot of of "in the money" stock options, or you have a pretty sizeable ESPP holding or sizeable holding of RSU stocks that you haven't sold, you might want to consider some short term, slightly out-of-money PUT options before earnings call next week to insurance yourself against a disasterous earnings call if that happens...
The option price for a $70 PUT option to sell QCOM that expires Jan 30 is about $1.40 right now..
In the event that QC has great numbers wall street loves it, the stock moves up, your stock options/ESPP shares goes up with it..And even though your $1.40 put option will go to $0, it would be most likely offset from the subsequent rise in the stock price...
In the event that QC's earnings call is a complete disaster, the hit to your portfolio will be much more lessened by the "insurance" your PUT options that gives you the right to sell at $70/share.
So for example, buying 10 puts to give you the option to sell 1000 shares at $70, would set you back $1400. In the event QC stock craters to $65/share, your "insurance" already paid off. You don't need to actually sell your shares, you can sell the PUT options themselves with a roughtly equivalent gain...
It's the strategy some of us did for high-flying internet companies back in the Web 1.0 days... Some of our unvested stock options had $30-40/share strike prices, and the market prices of our stock were around $250/share... So some of bought put options over a longer duration of $200/share while we remained unvested... They were pretty cheap During that time, our company stock did tank from $250/share to around $30/share, rendering some of our company issued stock options useless...But our PUT options ended going up significantly at the same time, and in many cases it was better that way, because the gain from the appreciation of our put options was immediately realized since it was options we bought and owned ourselves....Again, consider it insurance protection...
Anyway, good luck next week people...