Quiet trading before the long holiday weekend.  The Dow shed 5 points on light volume.  The advance/declines were positive.  The summation index is still moving up but not at a rapid pace.  The overall market was stronger than the Dow and that is a plus.  I think that if we can make it through Tuesday without a lot of damage we'll be heading to the promised land of 20000 on the Dow next week.  That's my guess at the moment.  I'm still holding the SPY January calls and will until Thursday of next week.  That is the strategy according to my technical work.  I could be wrong.  GE lost a few cents on lighter volume.  Gold was off a couple bucks on the futures and the US dollar was a bit lower as well.  The XAU and GDX had fractional gains on light volume.  Mentally I'm feeling OK.  The economic data was in line with expectations and there were no surprises from the bank earnings.  It would not surprise me if we come back from the weekend to some selling on Tuesday but we should move higher after that.  The inverse small head and shoulders pattern is still valid for now on the S&P 500.  The short term technical indicators still remain overbought but can stay that way during up trends.  Although we have just been going sideways now for 5 weeks.  My SPY January calls are slightly in the black.  This trade has seemed to last forever.  I did have a chance to exit with a decent profit a week ago but decided to hang on.  I still am a believer that this trade is going to work out but the market will go where it wants.  You can make a case for a decline here as well based on the technicals.  But the small stocks continue to show relative outperformance and that is bullish.  However with only 4 days left until expiration the risk going forward is much higher than I normally would accept.  So we'll see how it all plays itself out next week.  An extra day over the weekend to figure out what to do but my mind is pretty much made up.  For now it's Friday afternoon and time for a break.