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A lot of earnings gaps are being filled... gaps are a controversional subject in the technical trader world (of which I am loosely associated, although I am more of a fundamentalist) - BUT we have to respect charts and frankly the world looks a lot scarier without them because all you see are stocks in free fall. I went many years without using charts when I first started and looking back now, I don't know how I did it - it seems completely foreign not to look at them at this point. The controversy of gaps comes with the question - do all gaps get filled? No, not all gaps get filled, but a good many do. Let me show you two stocks I have sold off at higher levels patiently waiting for their gaps to fill - both just filled them in the past 24 hours.

Fluor (FLR) @ mid $160s - FILLED!

Mastercard (MA) @ low $240s - FILLED!



Now that is a positive step. However that does not mean this is "the bottom". Certainly I could see the way things are going Fluor fall to it's 200 day moving average of mid $150s and Mastercard down to just under $220. Or maybe they stop here and reverse - but at least with technical charts you have some sort of roadmap. And I cannot stress that once again, this is simply not a buy and hold market. Even the best stocks eventually are being taken to the woodshed, and I'm not talking the cursory 5-10% correction that happens in long winded bull market movements. Mastercard, probably one of the safest fundamental stories in my universe, just dropped 25% in a matter of a few weeks. These are serious corrections that erase all your unrealized gains - in just a few sessions. No matter where you are hiding. Hence I'd rather pay taxes (our last sale in MA was in early May right near $300) and lock in gains along the way instead of giving up all our gains and saying "hey no taxes if you buy this fund!" If we are in a bull market, we ride the trend and make less transactions. This is not a bull market (in case you did not get the news alert)

Again, the one gap I am keeping my eye on is this one below - it would make me much more bullish if this one filled as it would signal complete "throwing in the towel"; but with the "tech is a safe haven" thesis maybe it won't. Or maybe an earnings disappointment will be needed to do the trick. Or maybe it will "never" fill (I doubt it)