Today's markets gave traders quite a ride. RUT opened up and ran to $658 before dropping to bounce off the 200 dma at $641 and then ran up to close unchanged at $650. SPX displayed a similar pattern but did not recover all of its losses in the afternoon, closing at $1102, down $5. Trading volume jumped up today across the board with an increase of 18% on the NYSE and 26% on NASDAQ. The S&P 500 stocks traded up to 4.2 billion, just below the 50 dma.

Initial unemployment claims dropped by 11k to 457k and continuing claims increased by 81k to 4.56 billion. Unemployment appears to be stubbornly holding pretty flat; it is hard to discern an upward trend from the data. Earnings reports by and large have been good, but the companies' outlooks have averaged luke warm at best. The bulls are struggling to find sufficient evidence to "buy at the lows" while the bears can't seem to get too enthused about selling off strongly. Until that mixed outlook of indecision changes, we aren't likely to see a strong trend in the market in either direction. But the increased volatility in the markets during this period of indecision is somewhat new - the fear quotient is still quite high, and this causes the rapid swings back and forth we saw today.

At the open today, I was happy I still had one of my Sept call hedges in place, but later I decided to sell that, thinking it wasn't necessary any longer. Then, of course, the market turned back upward and ended up right where it started. My Aug condor's 680/690 call spreads are too close to the fire with a delta of 24. The condor position delta stands at -$69 while theta = +$131; this theta/delta ratio confirms what we know: I have significant price risk to the downside and while my profit engine (theta) is still larger, it is not much larger. It is at times like this that I am amazed by the analysts on CNBC who sound so confident in their predictions. How do they do that?