Happy Monday! And, if you’re celebrating Passover, I hope you enjoyed Seder.

I know - you’re receiving this email a little earlier than usual, but I can’t help it!

We’ve all had a few days to digest the heartbreaking news that Prince is gone. While I have never been a Prince groupie, I love dancing to “Kiss” and “I Wanna Be Your Lover.”

More over, I have always appreciated Prince’s individuality, including his love for the heels. It is Prince’s ability to embrace his uniqueness that offers a lesson for us going forward. And, Prince was a conscious investor!

Be Ready to Pull the Trigger

When it comes to investing, you must always develop your own philosophy for what is going to make you money. You have to be an individual, always searching for good themes that will help you reach your goals.

A great time to execute on individual stock investing themes is during earnings season. As I talked about late last year, company earnings do matter. In this past week, two earnings reports really stood out to me:

Steph Curry boosts Under Armour (UA) Earnings. UA’s footwear sales reached $264 million in the quarter, largely in part to Steph’s shoes, which outsold sales of LeBron James’ shoes. The stock jumped roughly 7% on the earnings, and is up 17% this year. BTW, if you haven’t read the backstory on how Steph left Nike for Under Armor, it’s worth the read – drama, power, and more!

Google Missed Earnings. The stock was down 5% on its earnings announcement because it missed Wall Street expectations.  The stock is down about the same amount for the year. Google is losing money on its blue sky projects, such as driveless cars and home automation. But, it announced that searches on mobile devices surpassed those on traditional computers – Wow. If you believe that GOOG will get more ad dollars from mobile, are you ready to buy GOOG?

I know – you didn’t think earnings reports could be so exciting, right? These reports give clues to trends as well as what’s hot and not. This week, see if one of your favorite company is reporting earnings.

Does the stock provide a better opportunity than the goods or services you buy? Leave a comment below sharing your thoughts.

Join Me

This Wednesday at 10pm EST / 9pm CST.  I will be the keynote speaker for the Hip Hops Sister’s Foundation Wealthy Wednesday call, sponsored by Prudential, on “Investing on a Budget.” Check it out here. I’d love to have you, even after you put the kids to bed!