Every major market index was down today. It started early with Intel's lowering of its outlook and it appears that as traders reflected on the Euro Summit over the weekend, they lost confidence that anything of substance had been really decided. So the fear that the European debt issues will spread to cause global economic issues is alive and well. SPX shed $19 to close at $1236 and RUT closed at $733, down $12. Institutional money managers appear to be sitting on the sidelines; trading volume was flat to decreased today with 2.8 billion shares of the S&P 500 trading, unchanged from Friday. Trading volume was down 7% on the NYSE and was down 6% on NASDAQ.

Interestingly, the VIX actually declined today as the markets also declined - is this a bullish divergence? The last three trading sessions have been maddening, steadily retracing the same territory each day. We will hear something from the FOMC tomorrow, but it isn't likely to move markets.

My Jan iron condor on SPX stands at a P/L of +$600 with delta = -$40 and theta = +$99. The call spreads are just outside one standard deviation OTM, so this position is in reasonable shape. The risk is principally on the call spread side since the 970/980 put spreads are very far OTM and thus unlikely to present a problem. The 560/570 put spreads are all that remain of the Dec RUT iron condor position, so they will expire worthless this weekend.

It will be interesting to see if today's divergence in the VIX is foretelling a move back up tomorrow. Of course, given the see saw action of the last several sessions, it is the bulls' turn tomorrow.