Markets jumped up at the open, but gave back the gains by noon and traded weakly into the close. Most of the major market indexes closed virtually unchanged for the day on lower volume. SPX closed at $1124, unchanged for the day and RUT was also unchanged at $651. Trading volumes dropped from Friday, which was expiration Friday; options expiration normally results in higher volumes. 3.7 billion shares of the S&P 500 traded today, just above the 50 dma of 3.5B. Trading was down 20% on the NYSE and was down 18% on NASDAQ.

The charts appear to show a building of support at $1120 on SPX and $650 on RUT. Today's candlestick on SPX was a shooting star; that may be ominous for tomorrow. Instead of building a support level, we could be pausing for the next leg down in a bear market.

RUT settled Friday at $651.70 so both of the remaining spreads in my RUT iron condor for August expired worthless for a loss of $356 on 20 contracts or a 2% loss on the capital at risk. The Sept condor stands at a P/L of +$700 with delta = -$4 and theta = +$14. Now we go back to watching to see which way this market turns: building support or about to tip over into a bear trend downward?