Everyone was focused on the FOMC announcement this afternoon and the markets traded downward immediately after the announcement. SPX lost $4 to close at $1375. Interestingly, RUT didn't react to the Fed announcement, but then traded off very strongly in the last thirty minutes; RUT lost $16 to close at $771. VIX remained unchanged at 19%.

The FOMC announcement was almost identical to the last one, but appeared to be a little more negative in describing the state of the economy and used slightly stronger language about a possible intervention. That disappointed many traders who had positioned themselves bullishly in anticipation of another round of quantitative easing. 

SPX traded down to support at $1375, but RUT sold off dramatically, breaking support at $775 before landing at $771. This divergence may be significant; several times recently, RUT has been a good market predictor when it diverged from SPX.

ADP reported the addition of 163k new private payroll jobs, down a bit from last month's 172k. The ISM Manufacturing Index came in at 49.8, about flat with last month. But one has to remember this index is structured in such a way that numbers below 50 indicate contraction, so two successive numbers under 50 isn't a good sign. We have the unemployment claims data tomorrow. Traders will be attempting to interpret that report together with today's ADP report to give them a preview of the jobs report Friday.

My Aug condor was pushed back to delta neutral by today's drop in RUT. It now stands at a P/L of +$2,340 with delta = -$6 and theta = +$52.