Up and down here on a daily basis as the market is trying to make up its mind here.  The Dow fell 150 points on pretty good volume.  The advance/declines were shy of 2 to 1 negative.  We dropped in the final hour and that isn't bullish.  The summation index continues lower.  My open order for the OEX puts wasn't filled but I'm leaving it in over the weekend.  I'll need to see some upside to hit my purchase price.  The overall market was not as weak as the Dow but that hasn't meant anything lately.  I think we are still headed lower and if we break 1770 on the S&P 500 things will unravel in a hurry.  I would like to take advantage of that.  GE was off over 1/3 and the volume was average.  No trades in mind here.  Gold bounced around on the futures but finished the day little changed.  The US dollar continued higher.  The XAU was down 1/2.  ABX was little changed on the session.  GG rose 3/4 but the story was with NEM.  It got clobbered on its earnings report and lost 2 1/2 on very heavy volume.  That points out the problem with trading the individual issues sometimes.  News can move it violently either way.  Happened with ABX last year.  If you are on the right side of the move it's great.  If not, you lose everything.  The trade off of trading the gold share indices is less price movement of the option premiums.  But the odds of getting wiped out are diminished.  Perhaps I'll try the GDX.  Something to think about over the weekend.  Mentally I'm feeling OK.  It's entirely possible that the major stock indexes are putting in a flag formation here, which would be a precursor to more downside action in price.  If that is the case my open order for the OEX puts will not get filled.  Yes, I'd like to see some upside early next week but the market rarely accommodates what I want.  The short term technicals are oversold but in down markets they stay that way.  I'll try and figure it out over the weekend.  Beginning of the month coming up so perhaps there will be some money flows into stocks.  The employment report in a week will certainly be a mover.  Gold looks to be approaching a point for a decent move one way or the other.  The bollinger bands are starting to converge.  We saw what that led to in the stock indices in the past two weeks.  Maybe it is time to just go ahead and buy some February gold share calls.  I'm really late with this trade and I have nobody to blame but myself.  The recent rise in the US dollar isn't really bullish for gold though.  Plenty to ponder.  There's still three weeks to go in the February option cycle so opportunity is out there.  Whether or not I can take advantage of it is the question.  Lots of charts to go over this weekend.despite the Super Bowl.  For now it's Friday afternoon and time for a break.