Obama and his allies are telling everyone that the end is near. It is almost as though he wants the market to crash. But the markets ignored him and traded back upward today with SPX tacking on $12 to close at $1691, coming close to making up yesterday's losses. RUT gained $7 to close at $1078. VIX decreased about nine tenths of a point to 16.7%, still a relatively high level of volatility. The low yesterday represented a 3% pullback on SPX, so the spike to 18% volatility yesterday was roughly in line with the last pullback in late August. Today's bounce also reinforced the support level on SPX at the 50 dma at $1680. So that becomes an excellent "line in the sand" to keep an eye on.

There were no economic reports today; normally the non-farm payroll report would have issued this morning, but that office was shut down. It doesn't appear that we missed it. By the way, one of the lies being knowingly perpetrated by many politicians and their lapdog media friends is that we are in danger of defaulting on the treasury debt. The facts are that tax revenue continues to flow into the treasury during the shutdown at the rate of over two hundred billion dollars per month. One month's interest on our treasury debt is about twenty billion dollars. Therefore, the only way we can default on our debt is if Obama orders his treasury secretary to do just that to further his political agenda. There is plenty of money to pay the interest due on our debt even if the politicians are still fighting over the debt ceiling (the debt ceiling only needs to be raised to accommodate all of the other spending in addition to our interest payments). I encourage you to check my figures.

I closed the put spreads in my October iron condor on RUT a few days ago because of my concern that the markets might melt down amid all of this rhetoric about the sky falling. With today's rally in the markets, I considered adding new put spreads to the position to boost the potential gains, but we only have two weeks left until expiration. I would have had to enter a position around 990 to 1000 on RUT to collect a reasonable credit. I decided the risk wasn't worth the additional gains. If the current call spreads expire worthless, a gain of 8.4% will result. That's more than respectable - no need to walk out on the thin ice.

Enjoy your weekend. It is cooling off here in Chicago. Fall is here.