We began the shortened week on an inauspicious note as the Dow lost 107 points on very light volume. Advance/declines were almost 3 to 1 negative. Rumblings of trouble again in the European credit markets were the excuse for the drop in prices today. We'll have to wait and see if there is any follow through tomorrow. We were approaching short term overbought and todays activity relieves some of that condition. Gold had a good day, up $5 as it backed off from setting a new all time high. The XAU managed to gain 1/2. The gold shares were mixed, with ABX up 1/2, NEM up 1 1/4 and GG down 1/2. Volume was light to average. The dollar had a good day and yet gold managed to rally. Gold it about at new highs but the gold share indices are nowhere near their old highs. We'll see what this means going forward. I'm getting long the gold shares on the next Gold/XAU buy signal. We are not close to a signal at the moment. Mentally I'm feeling better after the long holiday weekend. I'm making some trading tactic adjustments, to help prevent the kind of poorly managed trade that I just experienced. I'm also cutting down my amounts to trade until I can regain some sort of level of confidence. We're still in a trading range for the major stock indices. The S&P 500 has a potential head and shoulders bottom in place. For this pattern to be valid, we would have to break through 1135 on good volume. I'm not sold on that. I still feel that we will be heading lower and taking out 1040 on the S&P. I may try the October puts in the future.