Today was a slow news day and the markets just traded sideways most of the day with low volume. The major indexes might have closed unchanged if not for a sell-off in the last hour, resulting in all major indexes closing for modest losses. SPX closed down $7 at $ 1142 while the RUT lost $3 to close at $668. SPX appears to have established $1150 as its new resistance, so a breakout above $1150 and a breakdown below $1131 would be signs to watch for. All of this choppy trading occurred with low volume. Trading was down 17% on the NYSE and down 5% on NASDAQ. Trading in the S&P 500 stocks dropped to 2.8 billion shares, down from Friday's trading right at the 50 dma of 3.4 billion shares. A few individual stocks are moving upward, like GOOG and AAPL, but generally the markets appear stalled here with most traders on the sidelines.

My Oct iron condor is hedged with Nov calls and sitting in fair condition with a P/L of -$2,093 with position delta = -$92, and theta = +$141 on 20 contracts. The 690/700 call spreads are sitting at 0.6 standard deviations OTM while the 540/550 put spreads are over 3 standard deviations OTM with 17 days to expiration. I established the Nov RUT 520/530 and 740/750 iron condor last week for a credit of $2,740 on 20 contracts. It now stands at a P/L of -$800 with a position delta of -$48 and a position theta of +$78. The Jan 2011 270/300/330 call butterfly I recommended to my trading group in July is now up 62% - the market may be stalled, but AAPL is moving!