When I looked at the futures this morning, I gasped. Then I gasped again after the market opened and SPX plunged down to $1867 in about 5 minutes. It slowly recovered much of the loss through early afternoon, but then weakened again to close the day at $1893, down $78. RUT lost $45 to close at $1112. Volatility spiked as high as 53% on the VIX, before settling to 41%, up 13 points. Trading volume also spiked, with 4.8 billion shares of the S&P 500 trading today. Trading rose 27% on the NYSE and was up 26% on NASDAQ. This spike in volume is even more significant when you consider that Friday was options expiration which propped up that volume number somewhat.

That initial spike lower on the markets resulted in a lot of discussion in all of the financial media, with repeated references to the May 2010 flash crash. The initial loss on the Dow actually surpassed the May 2011 flash crash.

My Flying With The Condor™ service is 100% in cash, so we are watching the turmoil with a 34% gain year to date. That feels good. But the bigger question remains: is this "V bottom" different? The close today brought the SPX to 11% below the late July high. Is this a correction or the beginning of a bearish reversal? I would be the first to acknowledge the mediocre nature of U.S. economic data, but the data don't warrant this market. Is China's slowdown all that is going on here? More questions than answers.