I speculated that support in the form of the 50 dma on SPX had held yesterday. Today's price action was certainly very convincing that the market has bounced off support and the bullish trend is very much alive. Should we"go all in" as the poker players say? I don't think so. I really am an optimist in my daily life. I'm not the pessimist that expects everyone I deal with to cheat me, and is pleasantly surprised when things turn out well. But one has to have his or her rose colored glasses firmly in place to ignore the serious economic issues facing this country and the world. So I may place some bullish trades (I did enter a Dec 660/690/720 call butterfly on AAPL yesterday), but I am still cautious and watching this market very closely. If nothing else, I think the high frequency trading crowd has given this market a higher level of volatility than ever seen historically - that alone gives me pause. SPX was hot today, rising $15 to close at $1455 and RUT followed right along, closing up $7 at $835. VIX traded down early, but ended the day unchanged at 15.2%.

One likes to see increased volume to reinforce the observed trend direction. And trading volume inched up today with 2.6 billion shares of the S&P 500 trading. Trading on the NYSE increased 6% and volume moved up 10% on NASDAQ.

The CPI was released with a rise of 0.6% for September. Industrial production turned positive at 0.4% up in September - a big change from the previous month's 1.4% decrease. And capacity utilization edged up to 78.3% for September from 78.0% last month.

My Nov iron condor on RUT is nearly delta neutral with a net gain of $1,660 with position delta = +$22 and position theta = +$61. We are up almost 10% with 30 days to go until expiration. That's a pleasant change from the struggles managing my condors in September and October.

One cannot deny the bullish trend of the current market, but pick your positions carefully and manage the stops conservatively. This market will react badly to the next negative news item coming out of Europe.