The mood on Wall Street continues to be rather pessimistic with everyone focused on disaster scenarios such as a Euro zone default bringing down the global economy or Washington gridlock leading to the U.S. defaulting on its debt (this scenario is being told largely as a negotiating tactic - in reality, it is highly unlikely). The earnings reports so far have been pretty good but that hasn't affected trading outside of the particular stocks reporting. SPX closed down $11 at $1305 and RUT lost $13 to close at $816. Markets were down even more in early trading but recovered somewhat through the day. Outside of gold and AAPL, the screens were largely red. AAPL set a new all time high at $374 in advance of its earnings announcement tomorrow evening. But trading volume was down from Friday with 2.8 billion shares of the S&P 500 trading (right at the 50 dma). Trading volume on the NYSE was down 19% and trading was down 3% on NASDAQ.

My August iron condor on RUT continues to plug along, now at a net P/L of +$1,802 and delta = -$9 and theta = +$66. The pull back of the past week or so has actually pulled this condor back to a nice delta neutral position. The AAPL Jan 2012 butterfly recommended in my trading group a few weeks ago is doing well with AAPL's run upward; this position is already up 36%.

Today I opened a new section in the free Downloads area of this web site. I invite any of my blog readers to contribute any file that might be of interest to your fellow traders. The first entry is an article from one of my clients describing his journey learning to trade. If you have spreadsheets that you have found useful in your trading or anything else you would like to share, just send it to me with a note describing it and I will upload it to the web site.

Are you positioning yourself for Apple's earnings announcement? It should be interesting...