It's just a free fall panic at this stage. When the US debt was downgraded after the close on Friday, you'd expect Monday to be pretty ugly. It didn't disappoint. The Dow lost 634 points on heavy volume. The advance/declines were blown out once again, over 10 to 1 negative. The market is so oversold right now, I don't know what to expect. We are so overdone on the downside that the snap back will be furious. Or maybe not. Some of the stock indices have broken through their 200 week moving averages, others have not. I'm going to check the McClellan oscillator later tonight and if we are below -400 I may try the OEX calls tomorrow. We'll see. This could also be a rerun of the fall of 2008 where we just head lower. Feels like it at the moment. GE fell over a buck on blow out volume. The same question of how long this goes on is in effect. I'm looking at the January calls here but I'm in no rush. Gold rose $60 today. That's not a typo. The flight to gold has now sent gold parabolic. We all know that it never ends well when anything heads straight up. However it could go on for a while as was the case with silver. Silver stopped at a nice round number of $50. Could gold go to $2000? The XAU fell 3 1/3. The gold shares moved fractionally one way or the other on extremely heavy volume. ABX, GG and NEM were all up over $2 at one point. The ABX September calls actually moved higher, although the stock didn't do much. The US dollar was a bit higher. I'm going to hold on to the ABX calls for a while. The stock indices will not go down forever and the gold share calls have 6 weeks left on them. Mentally I'm feeling OK, could have slept more. It's been quite a wipe out in the stock market. It's really anybodies guess where we go from here. Panic does create opportunity. The charts are moving straight down. I'll check the indicators tonight and go from there. There is nothing wrong with sitting it out on the sidelines as well. However if the McClellan oscillator is below -400, I will be seriously looking at the OEX calls.