The Standard and Poors 500 Index (SPX) opened weakly this morning and immediately traded down to the low of the day at $1552. But then those super-resilient bulls pulled the market back up to close near its open at $1563, down only $1 on the day. RUT closed unchanged at $950. Volatility edged up just a bit with the VIX at 13.2%, up only 0.4 points.

The SPX candlestick today was a dragonfly doji, often a trend reversal signal at the top of the bullish trend. The theory is that it shows the increasing weakness of the bulls, even after allowing the price to drop so far, even though they succeeded in pulling it back up. It is hard to be very confident about a prediction of a trend reversal or pullback of any kind. This bullish run has confounded many analysts. But the longer we trade sideways, I think this makes it less likely that we see a violent correction. Just chopping sideways for a few weeks will burn off the excesses.

Trading volume remains low with two billion shares of the S&P 500 stocks trading; volume on the NYSE rose 5% while trading dropped off 2% on NASDAQ. In fact, you can draw a pretty good downward trend line on the S&P 500 trading volume over the past 2-3 weeks. As I discussed yesterday, both SPX and RUT are trading within well-defined sideways channels, consistent with low trading volume. We will most likely see volume pick up when the markets either break out to new highs or correct significantly.

Today was a slow day for economic data with a report of pending home sales for February being down 0.4%. That report probably had little or no impact on traders.

My Apr condor position stands at a P/L of -$1,601 or -8% with delta = -$21 and theta = +$102. The large theta/delta ratio underscores the rapidly improving P/L for this position. It seems that the all time high for SPX is proving difficult to surmount. We will probably start to see traders leaving for the long weekend tomorrow, so volume may fall off even more.