The nonfarm payroll report, aka the jobs report, showed improvement this month with an addition of 120 thousand jobs, up from 100k last month. Unemployment fell from 9.0% to 8.6%, but the average work week is flat at 34.3 hours. So the data represents an improvement, but far from enough to remove the European problems from traders' minds. The market opened up positively and SPX hit $1260 by about 10 am ET, but then steadily gave it all back throughout the day. SPX closed unchanged at $1244; RUT gained $4 to close at $735. Another indication of the general levels of apprehension on the street was the VIX, which actually edged up a bit to 27.5%. So the drive behind Wednesday's huge market move remains a mystery to me. Trading volume today was basically flat with 3.1 billion shares of the S&P 500 trading. Volume increased 4% on the NYSE but dropped 10% on NASDAQ.

I missed writing my blog yesterday because I was busy preparing for my trading group meeting last evening. The strength of Wednesday's move, coupled with the possibility of a positive jobs report stimulating another strong move upward caused me to close the 830/840 call spreads in my Dec RUT iron condor yesterday for $0.19. Now it is apparent that was unnecessary, but it was the safe move. Assuming the Dec 560/570 put spreads expire worthless (a safe assumption), that locks in a gain of $2,000 on 20 contracts or 12% on capital at risk. That brings the track record for the Flying With The Condor™ service to a 39% gain for 2011. If one had invested in the S&P 500 at the beginning of the year, he would be underwater by 1% at this point. So I'm proud of my 39% gain. Ouch! My shoulder always hurts when I pat myself on the back too much.

Allow me to make one more observation: I only had three months this year when adjustments to my condor position were not required. Several months required five or six adjustments to salvage a gain or minimize the loss. It is easy to put on an iron condor position, but managing the position is the tough part. You can download the detailed track record in the Downloads section of this web site.

The Jan iron condor on SPX at 970/980 and 1350/1360 stands at break-even with delta = -$39 and theta = +$74. The call spreads are approximately one standard deviation OTM, so the condor is slightly pressured from the top side, but is generally in pretty good shape, unless we have a few more days like Wednesday. But the beauty of non-directional trading is that I will deal with that if and when it occurs. I don't need to see the future to be successful.

Given all of the apprehension surrounding Europe, it is hard to forget about the markets over the weekend, but try to do just that. You can't do anything about it until Monday anyway, so focus on the family and regenerating yourself this weekend. Enjoy!