The markets opened down this morning but traded back up steadily and closed most of that gap before the close of trading. SPX closed down $4 at $1406 and RUT backed up $9 to close at $829. Yesterday, I was impressed that RUT had finally broken out of its trading range where it seems to have been stuck while SPX has been setting new highs. RUT must have heard me; it pulled right back into that trading range where it has been since early February. I still find the divergence of RUT to be interesting. It has not even come close to its 2011 highs while SPX has blown through the 2011 highs and has begun to set new highs every few days. SPX was last in the $1400 neighborhood in early 2008 and yet RUT can't eclipse last year's highs? Trading volume fell today with 2.7 billion shares of the S&P 500 trading. Trading fell 3% on the NYSE and dropped 2% on NASDAQ.

Housing starts came in at 698k for February, essentially flat from January. Building permits increased from 682k in January to 717k in February. So our economic data continues in the slow, lukewarm, recovery mode.

My Apr iron condor on RUT stands at a P/L of +$1,880 with delta = -$12 and theta = +$62. This position is up 11% with 30 days to go to expiration.