Event driven trades are definitely not done by humans, especially when they are scheduled such a economic releases or some other periodically released number. These are all computer driven. (I have written these for HFT shops for years now.)
Working on the pro side too, I also just hold ETFs mostly. No way an amateur day trader beats me at my job except by luck or finding trades too small for me to really care about.
Out of curiosity - do you get some kind of template version of the earnings report before it is released so you can parse the numbers? Are they just always worded the same way? Or do they broadcast the numbers directly somehow?
Earnings reports are the worst. Most of the economic numbers and other statistics are released in a machine readable format by a few companies that compete on speed. (There are some anomalies that come over the web and they are horrible to deal with.)
Earnings reports though I've tried numerous things from subscribing to services that release numbers electrically to writing parsers based on prior reports. Earnings though you care about things like one time charges, gaap and non-gaap numbers, etc. They are one of the less consistent things to trade.
Working on the pro side too, I also just hold ETFs mostly. No way an amateur day trader beats me at my job except by luck or finding trades too small for me to really care about.