Today's market action was a bit unenthusiastic after yesterday's strong push that opened the new quarter. Stocks traded steadily downward all day, but bounced a bit in the last hour of trading to recover some of the losses. SPX closed down $6 at $1413 and RUT closed at $835, down $6. Trading volume was up slightly from yesterday with 2.8 billion shares of the S&P 500 stocks trading today. Trading volume on the NYSE was up 5% and trading on NASDAQ was up 1%. The VIX closed at 15.7%, so it remains in the channel of about 14-17% of the past couple of weeks. We appear to be firmly in a bullish market, but the enthusiasm is waning. The good news is that as long as we basically trade sideways, the likelihood of a severe market correction becomes much smaller.

Traders were sitting on the sidelines much of today, waiting on the FOMC minutes to be released. Markets dropped after that release at 2 pm this afternoon, probably because there did not appear to be much discussion of another round of quantitative easing happening anytime soon. But after further reflection, traders moved in and pushed the major indexes back to close the day near where they were before the release of the minutes. Tomorrow will see the ADP payroll report and the ISM Services Index.

My April iron condor on RUT stands at a P/L of $2,500 with delta = -$5 and theta = +$51. The put spreads are far OTM and the call spreads are nearly two standard deviations OTM, so this position is sitting pretty at this point (a technical term). It has been an unusual month in that no adjustments have been required thus far. But the month isn't over yet.