Is this the pause that refreshes before the market seeks new all-time highs? Or are we going to consolidate sideways for a bit and work off this huge bullish drive of the past three weeks? Hard to say. SPX traded flat today, gaining less than a dollar to close at $2032. RUT gained a dollar to close at $1173. NASDAQ and RUT have both been trading sideways for the past several sessions while SPX just continued setting new record highs. If we go back to the charts when we were at the lows of this most recent correction, RUT and NASDAQ were the first indexes to recover and start posting positive gains. They led SPX out of the hole. Are they now slowing and leading SPX into a consolidation phase? Trading volume was down today with two billion shares of the S&P 500 trading; trading declined 5% on both the NYSE and NASDAQ.

The non-farm payrolls report came out before the bell this morning and posted 214 thousand new jobs, less than last month (240k) and less than what economists had predicted (250k). The unemployment rate ticked down a tenth of a percent to 5.8%. But the markets appeared to just yawn; they didn't trade strongly in either direction.

My November iron condor position only consists of the 1810/1820 put spreads at this point, so I am just watching those options decay. They are far enough OTM to be very safe (over four standard deviations), but I may close them soon just to free up margin for a new trade. The maximum return is 13.5% and we are essentially there. My December condor has been skirting along the edge of requiring hedging for the past week. Even though the market was flat today, I decided this morning to enter half of my normal hedge. That makes an ugly surprise on Monday less likely (more correctly, it will make the ugly surprise a bit less ugly).

Enjoy your weekend.