EB Watch List Update Report

Dear Members: Continuing market volatility today with all of the major indexes continuing to make major swings. The bulls would be pleased just to hold on to the gains from the past few sessions, especially given the huge rally off yesterday's lows. The VIX has settled down some but still remains above 30; the market is not out of the woods quite yet. Year end does favor the bulls with money managers needing to re-balance their portfolios with just a few trading days remaining for 2018. Even with the nice rally the past few sessions it's still tough for many stocks to hold all their gains. That makes it tough to find trades that have high reward to risk ratios high enough to make it worthwhile to risk capital. We do need to keep things in perspective here. The moves off the bottom have simply gotten back some of the huge losses experienced recently and all of the major indexes remain below all key technical levels. So it's not like traders are going all in here. One thing that we might consider at some point is issuing some short alerts on stocks that missed earnings,, pulled back substantially and then move close to key resistance; just the opposite of going long. We'll also consider long trades if we see signs that the worst of the selling is over or if the reward to risk ratio is high enough to make a stock worth pursuing. In the meantime there's nothing wrong being in cash in this volatile environment and waiting for much better set ups. At your service, John Hopkins EarningsBeats