Goldman Sachs crunched 35,000 earnings releases - and concluded these 10 stocks are your best bets for huge gains this season

• Vishal Vivek of Goldman Sachs says he's using options market data and his firm's own estimates to find most promising stocks during earnings season.
• He says both components are associated with the market's reactions to earnings, showing there are facts to support his approach.
• Vivek adds that options prices are unusually low compared to the last 30 years, which makes using them strategically more appealing today.
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Earnings season is upon us, along with its flood of numbers and stock moves. There are lots of opportunities, but how can investors sort through it all to find the best opportunities to profit?

Goldman Sachs equity derivatives strategist Vishal Vivek says he has answers, based on a study of 35,000 earnings events and more than 100 variables that predict price movements.

Vivek's research identifies the four variables that best predict a stock's direction on earnings day, and brings them together to find the 10 stocks that are most likely to surge in the first day of trading following their upcoming quarterly reports.

He's looking at moves implied by options-market positioning to find stocks where traders expect a lot of volatility, as that contributes to rallies following earnings. He's looking for stocks with relatively low short interest, as that's associated with negative moves.

He is also taking into account both Goldman Sachs' price targets for the stocks and its growth estimates for the companies, as he says both of those factors are correlated to gains for stocks following earnings.

Vivek adds that this is an especially good time to use options to put that kind of strategy into effect.

"With option prices broadly low (implied volatility on the average S&P 500 stock has declined to its 13th percentile relative to the past 30 years) we recommend buying options to position ahead of these earnings," he wrote in a note to clients.

Here are the 10 stocks Vivek considers the most promising. They're ranked from lowest to highest based on the size of the move the options market is implying.

Get the latest Goldman Sachs stock price here.