After six successive downward trading sessions, the markets finally had a positive day. SPX opened at $1335 and traded steadily upward all day. In fact, today's trading was the least choppy that I have seen in quite a while. SPX closed at $1357, up $22 and RUT closed up $11 at $801. The VIX dropped almost two points to close the day at 16.7%. That's pretty low and suggests relatively low levels of fear in the market. I am a little surprised we have put the European debt scare behind us so quickly. But today's rally occurred on much lower volume. Only 2.3 billion shares of the S&P 500 traded today; trading on the NYSE declined 17% and trading volume on NASDAQ dropped 22%.

China's GDP announcement this morning encouraged traders; it came in at an annualized rate of 7.6% for the first quarter and that was a bit better than analysts expected. The PPI came in at +0.1% for June and the University of Michigan customer sentiment survey came in at 72.0 for July, down a bit from last month's 73.2.

Those data points don't seem like the impetus for a $22 rally on SPX, but it is what it is.

I applied the Two Sigma Rule to my July RUT iron condor positions today and both spreads passed and will remain open. But the calls are just outside two standard deviations so I will watch them closely. We may close them next week. The July position stands at a net gain of $2,720 with delta = -$7 and theta = +$23. The August iron condor on RUT stands at a P/L of +$180 with delta = -$80 and theta = +$91. As evidenced from the delta/theta ratio, the call spreads are a little tight at about one standard deviation OTM. A possible adjustment may be in the works if the market continues upward as bullishly as it did today.

Assuming the July spreads expire worthless next weekend, our Flying With The Condor™ service will be up 35% for this year, as compared to the S&P 500 index, which is currently up 8% for the year.