We bounced around today and the Dow finished with a gain of 9 points on light volume.  The advance/declines were barely negative.  The summation index is still moving down.  We were up down and back up again today as the market is deciding what to do.  I think things could go either way as I said yesterday but I've still got the bearish bias.  With only six days to go in the May option cycle, it appears to be too late to put on a trade.  The risk is very high either way.  I may have to move out to the June options.  We should move off of the economic data tomorrow.  GE was off 1/4 and the volume picked up.  A firm issued a sell rating on GE today.  Technically the 50 day moving average contained the recent bounce.  Gold fell $10 on the futures as the US dollar was higher.  The XAU fell 1 3/4, while GDX shed 1/2.  Volume was average.  Gold should probably move tomorrow as well with inflation and retail sales news.  Mentally I'm feeling OK.  I'm now leaning towards staying on the sidelines with regards to a May option cycle trade.  There are both potential short term head and shoulders patterns both ways on the S&P 500 index daily candlestick chart.  The smaller one is bullish and the larger one is bearish.  These are potential patterns as they have yet to play out one way or the other.  Most of the short term technical indicators are exactly mid-range right now.  So you do not want to play a guessing game when trading.  The summation index is heading lower and the small stocks were relatively weaker today.  Along with the TRAN.  Those are bearish signs.  Volume was also very heavy in TRAN.  That could be a short term washout.  Or not.  So I think that at this time the prudent thing for me to do would be to let tomorrow go by and then take a look at things over the weekend again.  That's the idea at the moment.  Foreign markets were generally lower overnight.  We'll close out the trading week tomorrow.