The markets opened flat this morning and chopped sideways most of the day, but managed to hang onto some modest gains into the close. The Dow continues to flirt with $12,000 but can't quite make it there. SPX closed up $3 at $1300. This is seen as a significant technical resistance level because this was the last high for SPX before the market fell off the cliff in the fall of 2008. RUT closed at $795, up $2. The S&P 500 stocks traded down a bit from yesterday at 3.5 billion shares. Trading on the NYSE was down 8% and flat on NASDAQ. Initial unemployment claims jumped 51k to 454k and the number of continuing unemployment claims also increased by 94k. But this didn't seem to disturb the market too much, although it may have tempered the bullish action a bit.

My Feb RUT iron condor stands at a P/L of +$2,640 with delta = -$9 and theta = +$66. We are now standing at about 80% of the maximum profit which argues to close the trade. On the other hand, the call spreads are about 1.5 standard deviations OTM and the put spreads are nearly three standard deviations OTM, so that would argue that it is safe to allow this trade to continue to gain in profit ($660 remains on the table). I will probably allow the time decay to progress through another weekend before closing the position. Being too greedy can get one into trouble, but not collecting the gains when the probabilities are on your side doesn't make sense either. The answer is somewhere in between.