That is a crushing beat of the 51 cents expected by analysts, who have been playing expectations catch-up for over a month, trying to get a handle on this quarter's earning.

JPM’s earnings are more exciting than GS’s earnings as JPM were supposed to be "dragged down" by Chase Banking. With $2Tn under management, the company put up $3.6Bn in quarterly profit, almost 10 times what they made last quarter (.09). "These results included the negative impact of the tightening of the firm’s credit spread, offset by the positive impact of counterparty spread tightening and gains on legacy leveraged lending and mortgage-related positions.

Of course we could nitpick and point out that last year they had competition from LEH and BSC and last year they didn’t have $25Bn in bailout money to play with and they didn’t have a Fed Discount window feeding them countless other Billions every month at 0.25% interest but we won’t, because we are trying to get more bullish! Not wanting the Government to get the idea that they don’t need any more free money, CEO Dimon said: "While we are seeing some initial signs of consumer credit stability, we are not yet certain that this trend will continue." Frankly, I think the company sandbagged the earnings as they put $4.967Bn aside as a provision for credit card losses against $5.159Bn in total sales so either their clients are MAJOR dead-beats, or there will be some more profits recognized down the road (assuming all this recovery stuff is real).

INTC also beat earnings expectations last night but they are underperforming last year by a wide margin so not in any way as exciting as JPM’s results. Our strategy for INTC yesterday was to short sell the Nov $20 puts and calls for a total of $1.95 so our upside break/even on INTC is $21.95 but even last night, on the announcement, I still said to members I thought they were a short at $22 but we’re not going to fight the market, not now that we’re over our breakout levels.