After yesterday's strong push back higher, one might have expected a continuation of the bullish trend. The markets opened weakly this morning, but regained their footing by noon and closed with modest losses on the day. SPX lost $5, closing at $1763 and RUT closed down $5 at $1104.  Volatility rose a touch with VIX closing up three tenths of a point at 13.3%. Trading volume was modestly higher with 2.0 billion shares of the S&P 500 trading today (up from 1.9B yesterday). Trading volume increased 13% on the NYSE and increased 7% on NASDAQ.

The ISM Services index came out this morning at 55.4 for October, up modestly from last month's 54.4. But that didn't seem to impress the markets. The Boston Fed president, Eric Rosengren, was reported to have said that the FOMC will keep interest rates low for "quite some time". You might think that would encourage the bulls, but it didn't appear to have much effect. My impression is that more and more market observers are worrying about the long term effects of the Fed meddling in the markets.

My Nov iron condor on SPX continues to benefit from time decay lessening the loss on the position to -9% with position delta = -$66 and theta = +$230.

In after hours trading the market darling, Tesla, appears to have stumbled with the shares down over $20 to $157 in after hours trading following their earnings announcement. Is this the beginning of a slide or will the bulls come to the rescue?