After you receive this post, we will be selling 150 shares of Union Pacific (UNP) at roughly $224.99. Following the trade, the charitable trust will own 450 shares of UNP, representing 2.6% of the Charitable Trust.

As a reminder, we will always wait 45 minutes after we publish a trade alert before executing the trade. By waiting, we presume that Investing Club members will receive a better price in the market than what we do.

Union Pacific is scheduled to report third-quarter earnings Thursday morning before the opening bell. We think expectations are quite low into the print, even after the stock's rebound over the past month from $196 to within $5 of its all-time highs.

Investors should be well aware by now that that the company's 7% year-over-year volume growth target is at risk due to challenges related to the chip shortage and congestion at the ports. Higher coal volumes may not be enough to protect guidance.

While none of this is new news, we think it is right to trim UNP near its highs ahead of earnings because shares tend to trade lower on the report. In fact, shares of Union Pacific have traded lower after four of the past five earnings reports, with the outlier of the bunch being the quarter reported in July. And the stock lost all of those gains less than two months later.

It’s not like us to trim around positions in the portfolio, especially right before earnings. We are not traders. We are long-term investors and we typically buy and hold stocks for 6 to 18 months, if not longer. However, we are fully aware of UNP’s trading history and we want to be ready for a pullback.

After adding 50 shares around $209 in early September, Union Pacific has become a pretty large position in the Charitable Trust. This trim will give us some wiggle room to add back to our position on a pullback. At the same time, we don’t want to be complete sellers here because we think Union Pacific should have a strong 2022 as auto production bounces back and bottlenecks in the supply chain alleviate. And if we are wrong about the UNP quarter and shares end up trading higher from here, we’ll still have plenty of shares remaining in the Trust to enjoy the upside.

Lastly, and in similar thinking to our trim from yesterday, we think the market has had a nice run here with the S&P 500 up five straight days, and we believe it is prudent to lock in gains in some stocks that are trading near their highs. The trade will also slightly raise our cash position, providing us with more flexibility to buy other stocks we have more conviction in and are still trading well below their prior levels.

We will lock in a small gain of about 5% on stock we bought in early March 2021.

The CNBC Investing Club is now the official home to my Charitable Trust. It’s the place where you can see every move we make for the portfolio and get my market insight before anyone else. The Charitable Trust and my writings are no longer affiliated with Action Alerts Plus in any way.

(Jim Cramer's Charitable Trust is long UNP.)