For several weeks now, companies have been warning about disappointing earnings and now we have seen several weak reports from the likes of FedEx, IBM, Intel, and 3M. More importantly, many of the companies reporting thus far have painted bleak pictures for the upcoming quarter. It appears that this morning's report from DuPont was the last straw and the selling began in earnest. SPX had closed right at support at $1430 last evening and it quickly sliced through that support level and traded as low as $1408 before rebounding a bit to close at $1413, down $21. RUT dropped $4 to close at $816. The SPX chart shows a lot of congestion in the range of $1400 - $1410 from late August, so I would expect this broad level of support to hold, but if it doesn't, look out below! It is hard to believe that Bernanke was promising more quantitative easing just a few weeks ago; today's drop takes us back to pre-Bernanke announcement levels.

Trading volume jumped up a bit to 2.8 billion shares of the S&P 500 (50 dma = 2.5B). Trading on the NYSE was up 7% and was up 9% on NASDAQ.

VIX spiked up to 19.7% earlier today, but settled at $18.8%, up 2.2 points. This is the neighborhood where VIX was just before the Draghi press conference in early September when the focus was on Europe - this is a dangerous neighborhood. I will be looking closely at the futures tomorrow morning to see if the slide is likely to continue.

I took today's market weakness as an opportunity to close the 910/920 call spreads on my November iron condor on RUT. It now stands at a net gain of $1,280 or 7.5%. Tomorrow brings the FOMC report and press conference; will it matter?