Traders were relieved that China's market appeared to stabilize yesterday, so markets opened stronger this morning, but uncertainty remains about the Greek debt negotiations. Many analysts worry about the global impact of China and Greek economic problems. The VIX momentarily topped 20% today, closing at 19.9%, up 0.3 points. SPX gapped open and ran up as high as $2074 but then slowly declined throughout the day, closing at $2051, up $5. RUT gained $5 to close at $1234. Trading volume was down slightly with 2.2 billion shares of the S&P 500 stocks trading. Trading volume was way up on the NYSE due to yesterday's outage, but trading declined 2% on NASDAQ.

Initial unemployment claims were released at 297k, up from last week's 282k. Continuing claims also rose almost 75 thousand to 2.33 million.

My iron condors on the Russell 2000 Index are doing well with the August position up 6% and the September position up 5% at the close today.