The Challenger jobs report cited 42k jobs lost in February before the market opened this morning. This was viewed positively since it was the lowest monthly job loss number since 2006. As the market opened, the ADP payroll data report cited a loss of 20k jobs in February, the smallest decline reported by ADP in a year. The markets traded upward on the basis of this good (?) news until about 11:30 am ET. Then the markets slid the rest of the day to close essentially unchanged. RUT closed up about $1 at $649 while the SPX traded as high as $1125 before declining to close at $1119, a gain of less than a dollar. The FOMC Beige Book was released this afternoon and reported modest economic improvement across the country. Trading volume was up today on the NYSE and the NASDAQ but remains below average on the S&P 500. Notice how the SPX traded higher both yesterday and today but could not hold those intraday highs. That behavior was also true of the trading in RUT today. This makes me wonder if this bullish run that began in early February is running out of gas.

In the meantime, my wounded March condor limps along with a net loss of $3,460, delta = -$138 and theta = +$206. I have just about run out of options to salvage this trade any further, although we will achieve our goal of limiting any one month's loss to less than a month's potential gain. This position's loss will be steadily decreased as the time decay accelerates these last few days; but our best case scenario is for a small loss. The Apr condor is faring somewhat better but is in a weakened position after this recent run up in RUT. The P/L is -$955 with delta = -$138 and theta = +$206. The big difference with the Apr position is that we have a lot of time and possible adjustments remaining to salvage a gain from this trade.