As noted in my blog yesterday, I was concerned whether the major indexes could hold as support the resistance levels they broke yesterday, e.g., $1042 on SPX. Well, they did better than that, they closed above yesterday's closing prices. SPX closed at $1070, up $10 after trading as low as $1058, well above the strong resistance level of $1042 that was broken yesterday. RUT closed at $620, up $9. RUT traded down to $612, which was yesterday's close, but then rallied to close at $620. So the DJIA, SPX, and the RUT all traded down and tested yesterday's closing prices before trading higher today. All of this price action was very bullish and supports the idea of a bottom on the correction having been reached. However, it was on even lower volume than yesterday; trading on the NYSE was down 8% and trading was down 5% on the NASDAQ. Less than 4 billion shares of the S&P 500 stocks traded today, down from yesterday and well below the 50 day moving average, which is just below 5 billion shares.

A reduction in the number of initial unemployment claims cheered the market; the numbers came in at 454k this week, down from 475k last week. Similarly, the number of continuing claims dropped by 230k to 4.41 million. However, it is difficult to know how many of those 230k are now employed or whether they simply ran out of benefits.

My Aug condor is pretty much unchanged from yesterday with a P/L of -$1720, delta = -$37, and theta = +$97. The theta/delta ratio is high and the current value of the index is close to equidistant from the OTM call and put spreads. The price action of the past few days may have you looking for bullish trades, but beware of the low trading volume. This market is still dangerous.