This is becoming all too familiar. Trading in Asia and Europe seemed to set the stage for our markets as they opened weakly and never made it into positive territory all day. SPX closed at $1131, down $29 while RUT gave up $19 to close at $644. This places RUT right at the lower end of the trading range of the past two months. SPX is close the lower end of the range at $1120. Next week will tell the tale: either the markets strengthen and bounce back upward, or break through support to make new lows and confirm a bear market trend. From my perspective, mediocre to poor economic news abounds, but it doesn't seem to me that much of anything has significantly changed from two months ago - D.C. has deteriorated into a Hatfield and McCoys soap opera, the European Union is in disarray about the sovereign debt crisis; but we knew that two months ago. It seems the general mood of traders has simply turned pessimistic. The Chicago PMI came in at 60.4 today, up from August's 56.5 and the University of Michigan's consumer sentiment survey came in at 59.4 for September, a small improvement from the previous 57.8. But traders ignored this data and sold the market. Even more disheartening, the markets sold off strongly in the last hour of trading. Trading volume declined from yesterday with 3.5 billion shares of the S&P 500 trading, below the 50 dma at 3.9B; but trading volume was up 6% on the NYSE, and down 11% on NASDAQ.

My October iron condor on RUT continues to limp along as a 500/510 put spread. I closed the call spreads and have been waiting for the market to strengthen so I could re-position the call spreads and eventually roll up the put spreads. But so far, I have been trapped. Fortunately, the put spreads remain over two standard deviations OTM, but I am starting to run out of time.

Next week should be interesting, but now we turn our attention to our families, chores around the house and healthy recreation. Have a great weekend.