It's all about the headlines coming out of Washington at this point.  The Dow fell 120 points on expiration heavy volume.  The advance/declines were 2 to 1 negative.  No tax deal yet and the stock indices are now nervous.  I still think they will get something done by the new years deadline.  It is how the market reacts after that which is what you should be watching.  We're still overbought on the short term technicals.  GE was off a bit over 1/8 and the volume was very heavy again.  Getting oversold on a daily basis here but it's not all the way there yet.  I have no trades in mind here at the moment.  Gold bucked the trend and rose $14 on the futures even with a stronger US dollar.  An oversold bounce or the flight to safety?  I certainly don't know which it was.  The usual inverse relationship between the dollar and gold remains not to be in place.  It's been that way for a while and I don't know what to make of it.  The XAU was up 1/4 today.  ABX and GG had fractional losses, while NEM had a fractional gain.  The same results as yesterday.  Volume was very heavy.  I would like to try the calls on ABX again but it hasn't worked lately.  It is both short and medium term overbought.  That hasn't meant much lately though.  I'll ponder it over the weekend.  Mentally I'm feeling OK.  Had some internet issues during the trading day and that is never a good thing.  Some of the stock indexes had gaps lower today and that isn't a positive sign for the bulls.  However in this headline driven atmosphere, and announcement of a tax deal could send us back to the upside in a hurry.  We'll find out in a matter of days.  It's a holiday week next week and that could skew things with the lack of volume.  Even with todays move higher, gold hasn't been acting well lately and we broke the support at $1680.  The gold shares are still oversold and have been for a while.  Yet there hasn't been any rally.  So we'll see.  I'll go over the charts this weekend and keep an eye out on the news from Washington.  For now it's a December evening and time for a break.