The markets liked what they read in the jobs report this morning and traded up strongly through most of the day. But the major indexes gave back much of their gains in the last hour or so of trading. SPX closed at $1332, up $7 after trading as high as $1338 earlier in the day. RUT set another 52 week high at $847, up $3, after trading as high as $851. Trading volume was flat to down with three billion shares of the S&P 500 trading, well below the 50 dma. Trading volume was down 7% on the NYSE and up 11% on NASDAQ.

216k new jobs were added in March according to the US Nonfarm Payroll Report; this was up from the 194k reported for February. The unemployment rate dropped 0.1% to 8.8%. The ISM index reported out essentially unchanged for March at 61.2 (61.4 last month).

Two things concern me about this market: 1) the fact that the bulls could not hold the highs today, and 2) the continued anemic trading volume. I have to continue to play what the market gives me, but this market seems weak, even as it makes new highs.

I closed the call spreads of my Apr iron condor on RUT today during the late afternoon sell-off. Assuming the Apr 700/710 put spreads expire worthless (that appears to be a safe bet), we will book a gain of $2,220 on 20 contracts or 13% on the capital at risk. This week, I became concerned that this market might just continue to climb upward and having two weeks left until April expiration, I decided it was prudent to close this condor early while we could confirm 93% of the maximum potential gain of $2,400.

The May condor is standing essentially unchanged at a P/L of -$1,240 with delta = -$22 and theta = +$54. The Jun $880 calls are doing their job, hedging our losses and buying us time for the market to pull back. If the market continues higher and forces me to roll the call spread upward, those June calls will continue to reduce our losses. The trick to managing iron condors is not making money every month because you have placed the spreads so far OTM; it is minimizing the losses when they come. Because they will come.

Have a great weekend.