The markets were caught today between fears of the next shoe dropping in Europe and some improved economic data here at home. SPX gained $4 to close at $1216 and RUT closed at $716, up $8. Trading volume dropped from yesterday with 2.8 billion shares of the S&P 500 stocks trading. Trading volume dropped 10% on the NYSE and dropped 2% on NASDAQ.

Initial unemployment claims came in at 366k, down from last week's 385k, while continuing unemployment claims held steady at 3.6 million. We seem to be steadily holding the initial claims number below 400k - a welcome trend. The PPI for November increased 0.3%  and capicity utilization remained flat at 77.8%. The Empire Manufacturing Index increased to 9.53 for December from last month's 0.61. All in all, this wasn't resoundingly good news, but it wasn't bad either.

I chose to close the 1350/1360 call spreads in my Jan SPX iron condor today. I was able to take them off for a small gain and basically lock in a reasonably high probability gain for this position. The SPX Jan 970/980 put spreads are far OTM and should expire worthless unless we have a global meltdown of some kind. Assuming the put spreads expire worthless, that will result in a 13.5% gain for this condor - not a bad start for 2012.