One of the measures of a strong bearish market is a close at the lows of the day, as we saw last Thursday and Friday on SPX. Monday plunged even lower, but recovered some of those losses before closing. Just as we caught our breath yesterday, the market fell out of bed late in the day to close at the lows once again. We finally saw a close hear the highs of the trading session today with SPX hitting a high at $1943, and closing at $1941, up $73. RUT traded even more bullishly, trading lower to match yesterday's close, and then RUT rallied higher to close at $1132, up $28. Volatility pulled back six points with the VIX closing at 30%, still a relatively high volatility level, but not nearly as high as Monday's intraday high at 53%.

Trading volume was unchanged from yesterday, but remains above average with 3.8 billion shares of the S&P 500 trading. Trading on the NYSE was up 6%, but trading volume on NASDAQ was up only 1%.

I think most market observers have concluded that we are not going over the cliff and starting a bearish trend, but instead, we are observing a relatively significant market correction of about 12%. The resulting question on everyone's minds is whether we have seen the bottom yet? The closing lows for SPX in the last significant correction (Oct 2014) were around $1862. Monday's intraday low and Tuesday's close were at $1867 and $1868, respectively. So it looks like the October correction low may provide support for this correction. But correction bottoms are always messy affairs. We will likely see some choppy markets before we see a definitive recovery begin.

For those of you willing to take a little more risk, selling OTM put spreads on the broad market indexes at these volatility levels is attractive. As volatility declines, it will make it easier to close for a larger percentage of the profits. Of course, this presumes we have seen the worst of this market decline. Therein lies the risk.