Strength in the financial sector appeared to boost the entire market today. The S&P 500 and the Russell 2000 indexes bounced strongly off the support levels they were toying with for the past few sessions. RUT closed at $493.31. I will be watching the next levels of resistance on RUT around $520 and $535. I re-established the call spreads for my August iron condor this morning. I would have preferred the 540/550 strikes, but I have another position with long $540 calls, so I dropped down to the $530/$540 call spreads for $1.40 (or $2,800 for 20 contracts). As it turned out, the market continued up strongly all day and I hedged my position by buying 2 Sept $530 calls at $9.60 in the early afternoon. This hedge will hold my position loss to less than $1,000 up to around $525-$530 on the RUT. This buys me time to see if the RUT bounces off its resistance levels at $520 and $535 before I pull the plug on this trade. At the close, the iron condor position stood at a gain of $280, delta = -$15 and theta = +$95.

I also established a new iron butterfly position late in the trading day with the $440/$490 puts for $13.70 and the $510/$560 calls at $9.55, for a total credit of $6,975 on 3 contracts ($8,025 of capital at risk). I positioned this butterfly with some bullish bias (positive deltas) because the RUT bounced so strongly off support today. I will plan to be in this position for two weeks or less.