Today was another one of those days. Just when we think the market is bouncing back, it trades off. SPX opened this morning at $2084 and traded sideways through early afternoon. If the market had closed around 1:45 pm ET, we would have had a flat day, but then it simply traded off into the close, losing $18 to close at $2068. RUT lost $5, closing at $1253 and the VIX moved up almost one point to 15.3%. The VIX struck me as behaving somewhat benignly on a 1% drop in SPX; maybe we are all becoming accustomed to this whipsawing price action. Trading volume was mixed with slightly higher trading volume in the S&P 500 stocks at 2.0 billion shares (up from 1.9B yesterday), and a 15% rise in volume on the NYSE; but trading volume was flat on NASDAQ.

The Case Schiller housing price survey reported an annualized rise of 4.6% for January, up slightly from December's +4.5%. The Chicago PMI reported at 46.3 for March, up from 45.8. And the Conference Board consumer confidence survey rose to 101.3 from 98.8. I saw a couple of news headlines for today's markets, claiming the market dropped on mixed economic data - really?

The markets will be closed on Friday, but the jobs report will be issued anyway, so that could be interesting. Layering on that report will be the possibility of another shoe dropping over the weekend in the Greece/Euro Zone negotiations. We may see traders taking off more vulnerable positions this week, and we may see the VIX move a bit higher as traders seek protection from events over the long weekend.