Positive durable orders data this morning set the market off to the upside. When I first looked at my screens this morning, it was a rare moment: every Asian index was green, every European index was green and all of the U.S. futures were green. But that only lasted until about 1:00 pm ET, then a slow decline began. Late in the afternoon, it looked like the tide was turning back upward, but then the bottom fell out and SPX and RUT both closed at their lows for the day. SPX lost $13 to close at $1853, while RUT fared much worse, closing at $1155, losing $23 on the day.

For all of that carnage in the small caps, the VIX only increased about one point to 14.9%. The VIX is based on SPX options, so the sell off was in the small caps - classic risk off behavior. SPX also closed at its low for the day, but didn't come close to breaking support at $1850, whereas RUT broke support at $1165 and broke through the 50 dma at $1163, closing $8 lower at $1155.

A somewhat contrary indicator for all of this downward price action was trading volume; only 2.3 billion shares of the S&P 500 stocks traded today, still below the 50 dma at 2.4B. However, trading on the NYSE increased by 10% and trading volume increased 8% on NASDAQ.

The early market action was driven largely by the positive durable orders report which increased 2.2% in February, a big change from January's 1.3% drop. However, if you subtracted defense and aircraft, core business equipment spending dropped 1.3% in February.

The conventional wisdom tied the market losses to Western countries making noise about increasing the sanctions against Russia over Crimea and the Ukraine. The Ukraine bogeyman keeps spooking this market. But today, there was an absence of bulls coming in to buy the dip. Will they show up tomorrow, or is it time to start clearing out trades? The last Putin scare took SPX down to $1840 and RUT to $1173, so RUT has already set a lower low...

I will be watching those futures in the morning very carefully.