The Dow lost 15 points today on heavy volume. Advance/declines were about even. We were up for a good portion of the day and fell off in the last hour. We haven't even met the minimum retracement here yet so I did not get any OEX puts. Perhaps we will just drop from here, I don't know. But I'm going to try and be patient. I will wait for a better retracement and if it doesn't happen then this idea won't fly. Gold was up around $6 today but the XAU was down over a half. Volume here was light. I still have a GTC order in for some ABX April calls. May not be the best idea but the charts say otherwise at this point. The uptrend line in gold itself is still intact. Now if that fails then I'll have to rethink things here. So I'm in a waiting game at the moment. I think that I will let the employment number come out on Friday and see how things react from there. It's probably the prudent thing to do. Mentally I'm feeling OK for now. I would like to try and make some money before the expiration next week. I do have a couple of ideas. But the markets don't wait for anybody and they certainly don't care about what I'm planning. So we'll see what transpires...