Welcome to the weekend, fellow traders. And, what a week! Technically speaking, stocks broke under a major technical floor on Thursday but somehow managed to avoid a meltdown on Friday... despite the U.S. air strike in Iraq late Thursday. It's amazing what the market can ignore when it wants to. At a different time or in a different market scenario, the exact same news could have crushed stocks. On August 8th, 2014 though, it didn't matter in the least. Just crazy. So what's next for the market in light of Friday's turnaround from what would have been a nasty meltdown? Well, that's just it. While we certainly delayed a bigger selloff, we're still not convinced stocks are going to be able to make higher highs without making lower lows first. Let's just start at the beginning. The market was up about 1% today, and if we use the S&P 500 as our proxy, the reason the S&P 500 was up today was simply its ability and willingness to push up and off of the 100-day moving average line area. This could be the dead-cat bounce I was expecting a couple of days ago. In fact, I think this is the dead-cat bounce I was expecting a couple of days ago. More important to all of us right now, I've got a feeling the market's going to be able to make higher highs until we finally retest the ceiling around 1955 we talked about earlier in the week. That's where the 20-day and 50-day moving average lines are converging, and it's also where the floor from July was/is. After that, the bears should growl again. We can also add a lack of volume behind today's bullish move to the list of still-bearish arguments. Now, admittedly there are some holes in the bearish thesis. One of them is the way a ceiling at 17.2 has developed for the VIX. In fact, the VIX's ceiling seems to have sparked its rollover today. The VIX has room to keep falling before hitting support too, mirroring the way the S&P 500 has room to keep rising before bumping into the resistance at 1955. If I had to guess, both the VIX and the S&P 500 will use most if not all of that room before the rally runs out of gas. Whether we use all of this room or not, however, I've still got a feeling the market's yet to hit its ultimate term bottom. Between August usually being a tough month, the fact that the market was so overbought and overvalued to begin with, and the fact that even as bad as things have felt since topping back on July 24th we've still only given up about 4.4% of the S&P 500's peak value, we're due for a bigger correction than the one we've seen thus far. Yes, we've not seen a stumble bigger than 5.0% since late-2012. That's the point! Eventually the law of averages is going to catch up with us and dole out a more significant correction, and now would be the perfect time for Mr. Market to dish out that pain. That doesn't mean stocks will dole out the pullback in a straight line, though. All we can do between now and then is wait, although I don't mind telling you John Monroe at the Elite Opportunity added some perspective on where and why he thinks the market is going to bottom out just under a key line in the sand. Hint: While Monroe sees some lingering downside risk with stocks, he also explained in today's newsletter how the market could get away with a minimal move lower before finding a bottom and starting a sustained rebound. Here's how you can read more about John's thoughts, or cut and paste this link: https://www.smallcapnetwork.com/?vmpd_ckstr[click_track]=Newsletter&vmpd_ckstr_redirect=/pages/SCNEO/v1/ Check it Out For those of you who've been getting the newsletter for at least a few weeks, you certainly know by now about half of our stuff is deigned to tell you about what's really going on in the market, while the other half is intended to teach you about how the market really works. I think it was a few weeks ago we explained it's our mission to show and teach you so much - to learn by doing - that eventually you won't even need to the read the newsletter. It's a lofty goal we'll probably never actually reach, but it's still a goal worth aiming for. With that in mind, we want to point out a great commentary Bryan Murphy posted at the site today, not because it's a salient opinion on a particular stock (it is a salient point, but that's not the important part to us right now), but because it's a great object lesson about picking stocks. We will tell you upfront his stock pick is JC Penney (JCP), and he makes a great as well as surprising bullish argument. It's not the core of his bullish thesis though. The point he makes is.... well, you'll just have to read it and learn it for yourself. We can tell you we 100% agree with the philosophy about the timing of his call on JCP, however. The market loves to do odd things and odd times, and sometimes you have to keep tabs on the obscure stuff to know when to expect surprises. Speaking of posts at the site, did everybody see John Udovich's look at Ebola stocks today? He offers this primer on some of the leading names in the war or Ebola, and he even adds a few fringe players in related spaces. This coming Monday is something of a D-Day for magicJack VocalTec (CALL). That's when we hear about last quarter's earnings from the oft-discussed and oft-debated telecom technology company. The gist of the debate is, while with just a quick glance it seems magicJack is still growing, the deeper you look into the details of how and when it books prepaid revenue, the more it seems this company's top line growth is already slowing down. If CALL is to convince anyone it has a future, it's going to need to do so when it posts results at the beginning of the coming week. Peter Graham penned all the relevant details here. Last but not least, though it's 100% too late to do anything about any of them if you happened to own any of these names at the wrong time, James Brumley gave us a great visual reminder that trading IPOs is little more than a coin toss if you're planning on being in them for any measurable length of time. Some of these charts are downright scary. That's all we've got for you today, ladies and gents. But, we should have an updated earnings report card for you early in the coming week. Hopefully we'll have a new trading idea or two for you as well.