The markets opened in positive territory this morning on overnight news that Dubai World appears to have solved its debt liquidity problems, at least for the time being. And Exxon-Mobil announced its planned acquisition of XTO Energy this morning; this encouraged investors that the merger/acquisition business may start to resume. The dollar traded downward today, which probably helped stocks to trade higher, although that influence appears to be waning. The Russell 200 Index (RUT) traded up steadily all day to close at $610, an increase of over $9. Trade in the S&P 500 (SPX) was more choppy, but closed up almost $8 to close at $1114, a new closing high for the year (the year's high of $1119 was intraday).

The strong increase in RUT pulled the P/L of my Jan iron condor back a bit to +$940, with a delta = -$86 and theta = +$121; the delta of my short $650 calls is just under 16. I decided to add a new Jan condor on RUT with 10 contracts of the 630/640 calls at $2.55 and 570/580 puts at $2.10. This is a shorter term (31 days) iron condor with the spreads positioned much closer to the index (the calls are at 0.5 standard deviation and the puts are at 0.7 standard deviation). This is a more dangerous configuration of the iron condor and must be carefully managed; on the plus side, we should be in and out of this position much more quickly than our normal condors positioned out about 50 days or so. At the end of the day, this position stood at a P/L of -$100, delta = -$34 and theta = +$60. Traders are looking forward to the FOMC meeting later this week, but it is doubtful that they will make any moves that surprise the market. Of course, it is in precisely this complacent situation when any surprise has a huge impact.