The markets opened in negative territory this morning and momentarily looked as though yesterday's shooting star candlestick was indeed an indicator of a trend reversal. But the indexes dropped, hit support, and started a steady climb upward that accelerated for the last two hours of trading to end the day with all of the stock indexes up across the board. RUT ran up $8 to close at $613 while the SPX closed at $1093, an increase of about $12.

My Nov iron condor on RUT now stands at a P/L of +$2,460, position delta of -$8 and position theta of +$84. My put spreads are now about two standard deviations OTM and the call spreads are about 1.5 standard deviations OTM. The iron condor spread is my "bread and butter" trade and my trading record now stands as:

June: +$4,600 or 29%

July: +$1,400 or 10%

August: -$810 or -5%

September: +$1,630 or 6%

October: +$715 or 6%

November: +$2,460 or 15% (still open)

Given the severe market volatility of the past several months, I am particularly pleased with this track record. Iron condors are easy trades during slowly trending or sideways markets, but 2008 and 2009 have been extremely challenging for all delta neutral traders. If you can successfully trade iron condors in this environment, I would dare say you could trade them anytime.