Bernanke is scheduled to testify before Congress tomorrow and it appeared that traders were waiting on some news of another round of quantitative easing. The markets opened lower this morning and basically traded sideways all day with lower volume. SPX closed down $3 at $1354 and RUT lost $4 to close at $797. Trading volume dropped with 2.1 billion shares of the S&P 500 trading today (the 50 dma = 2.8B). Trading volume decreased 9% on the NYSE, but increased 5% on NASDAQ. Earnings numbers and guidance thus far have not been overly optimistic. When you couple that with some of the recent weak economic data such as the jobs and retail sales reports, we get weak sideways trading on lower volume.

The VIX ended the day at 17.1%, so that suggests that traders aren't too fearful. But clearly, they aren't buying with both fists either.

My July iron condor on RUT essentially stands at its maximum 16% gain at this point with both spreads far OTM and expected to expire worthless this weekend. The Aug position stands at a P/L of +$580 with delta = -$73 and theta = +$95. Traders will be watching for any clues that Bernanke is going to initiate another round of quantitative easing, so we are probably in for some intraday volatility tomorrow and the next day as Bernanke testifies before Congress.