The market shrugged off the increase in unemployment claims this morning and initially traded higher. This happened, of course, because I still had some Oct 700/710 call spreads open. As soon as I closed those spreads and took my loss, the market began to trade lower (it wasn't quite that bad, but you know the feeling). RUT traded as low as $699 before recovering to close at $705, down $2 on the day. SPX hit $1167 before retracing much of its loss to close at $1174, down $4. Trading volumes were flat to down a bit from yesterday's high levels. About 4.5 billion shares of the S&P 500 stocks changed hands, flat from yesterday, but both of these days were well above the 50 dma at 3.4 billion shares. Trading on the NYSE was down 4% and was down 11% on NASDAQ. Initial unemployment claims rose 13 thousand to 462k while continuing claims dropped 112k to 4.4 million. The PPI rose 0.4% in September, same increase as last month. Given the general absence of significant market moving news and the weakness in the financial stocks, the fact that the markets were able to recover most of today's losses was very bullish behavior. Personally, I don't fully appreciate the case for the bulls, but they appear to be controlling the market.

My Oct iron condor on RUT is almost completely closed; I have allowed the 610/620 put spreads to enter expiration to expire worthless. I closed the remaining 700/710 call spreads today. I have not tallied all of the damages yet, but the Oct position was a big loser; I will report the sordid details tomorrow with my post audit of the trade. The Nov iron condor has been hedged with Dec $740 calls and I rolled the initial 520/530 put spreads up to 600/610. The P/L for the position is underwater by $3k with delta = -$26 and theta = +$80. The delta of the Nov $740 calls stands at 27 so we are far from out of the woods with this position. Today's spike up in IV pushed the P/L down quite a bit.

So now we wait to see who wins the tug of war tomorrow.