[Update: Find more from Timothy Sykes here, and more stocks to buy here.]

Each quarter brings a new batch of earnings plays, so which ones should you trade?

I've had my fair share of successful calls, but I've also been burned badly before. One time, I put in a solid week's worth of research (pdf) to pick Vasco Data Systems (NASDAQ: VDSI) right before earnings, and what happened, they totally blew it. A 30% drop. It still stings. This is just the latest reminder that you can't trust companies, analysts or really anyone on Wall Street.

So far, in this latest round, Intuitive Surgical (NASDAQ: ISRG), E*Trade (NASDAQ: ETFC), Mastercard (NYSE: MA), VistaPrint (NASDAQ: VPRT) and Concur Technologies (NASDAQ: CNQR) have performed well while Google (NASDAQ: GOOG), Accuray (NASDAQ: ARAY), Cadence Design Systems (NASDAQ: CDNS), Yahoo! (NASDAQ: YHOO) [editor's note - this was written prior to today's news], VMware (NYSE: VMW), Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL) and Synaptics (NASDAQ: SYNA) have all bombed.

Amazon.com (NASDAQ: AMZN), Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) and Broadcom (NASDAQ: BRCM) all had very solid quarters, but where did it get investors? Nowhere -- all three stocks are flat since then.

This all leads me to one inevitable conclusion: don't play the earnings guessing game!

No matter how much research time you put in, no matter how many analyst reports you dig through, no matter how well or not well the stock has held up going into earnings, it's impossible to predict which companies will fail, meet or beat expectations. It's all just one big guessing game that brokers wants you to play because they want their commissions. Some would argue that this sums up the stock market as a whole, but I believe there are distinct times when your odds are better than the rest, and in the coming years, I'll be sure to write about each one.

But this is definitely not one of those times, so please don't play the earnings guessing game. That's why while I have a list of stocks with upcoming earnings that I'm interested in, I'm not going to write about them just yet. If you must trade within the next few weeks, wait a week after a company's earnings are announced, because by then, the earnings-influenced trend, whether up or down, will be much more apparent.

Timothy Sykes writes the blog timothysykes.com, is a former hedge fund manager, star of the TV show Wall Street Warriors and author of the book, An American Hedge Fund: How I Made $2 Million as a Stock Operator & Created a Hedge Fund