SPX closed down $7 today at $1776. But RUT climbed $2, closing at $1103. Maybe RUT was making up for some of its extreme move downward yesterday. In any case, SPX's move today broke a significant support level at $1780, and closed just above the highs set in late October. Many analysts have been saying that their bullish opinion on this market would only change if SPX broke support at $1780. Now, both SPX and RUT have broken the lower support levels of the sideways channel of the past few weeks. But tomorrow could tell a different story. Trading volume was pretty flat with 2.1 billion shares of the S&P 500 stocks trading. Trading volume rose 1% on the NYSE and dropped 2% on NASDAQ. The VIX rose only a tenth of a point to 15.5%.

Economic news was mixed. Retail sales came in unexpectedly strong with a 0.7% rise in November. But unemployment claims increased 68 thousand to 368k. Continuing unemployment claims rose by 40 thousand to 2.8 million. I have embedded a very telling chart from today's Investors Business Daily below the blog. The normal practice of the Labor Department is to exclude the unemployed workers from the count if they have given up looking for work, and this tends to result in lower unemployment numbers the unemployed "drop out". If one does include these workers into the total number of unemployed, the unemployment rate has been constant to about 11% throughout this recession. This correlates well with my perception, based on people I speak with in my neighborhood, at work and so on. The economic recovery we hear about is largely propaganda or naive ignorance.

My Dec RUT iron condor at 1030/1040 and 1150/1160 stands at a net P/L of +$3,390, or +21% with delta = +$4 and theta = +$167.