The market simply collapsed today as the Dow dropped over a thousand points.  The most watched index shed 1175 points on extremely heavy volume.  The advance/declines were over 8 to 1 negative.  The summation index is in a free fall.  I thought support was at 2700 for the S&P 500 but we just knifed through there.  The market goes where it wants.  Volatility is off the charts.  The market goes down faster than is goes up.  We've wiped out the gains for the year in just over a week.  I made the mistake of getting some SPY February calls to try and play a bounce that I thought would happen.  That trade is getting crushed and I doubt it will come back.  The volatility is keeping the premiums up.  So if I can hang around for the snap back bounce, I may be able to salvage a workable loss.  Otherwise it's just kiss it goodbye.  We're in extreme market conditions here, so anything goes.  It looks like there's more support for the S&P at 2600 but there are no guarantees there.  Well, at least I was right about the rally being over.  Those February puts would have been quite profitable if you got them and held on.  GE lost 3/4 and the volume was very heavy.  Who knows where we're going here.  Gold was up $6 but nobody noticed.  The US dollar rose in a flight to safety.  The XAU and GDX had fractional losses on good volume.  Mentally I'm feeling OK.  I suppose you could call today a mini-crash since we did drop over 1000.  It was off even more than that at one point late in the day.  I do think that it is a bit overdone at this point but what do I know?  We are due to bounce but we were due this morning as well.  The McClellan oscillator is even more oversold now and it won't stay that way for long.  At least usually it doesn't.  For me I'm now in the hoping stage and that is no way to trade.  I'll be looking to see how much I can cut the loss.  Where does the market go from here.  Even after todays sell off, I still  see in the media that this is nothing to worry about and stocks will come back.  That tells me that there is still a lot of complacency out there.  So we probably have lower to go.  There is no doubt in my mind that this is the beginning of a bear market.  The long bull market has come to an end.  I don't know how long the bear will last but in my view the rally since 2009 is now over.  There's nine days to go in the February option cycle.  If I hadn't gotten filled on the SPY calls today, I would be sitting the rest of this option cycle out.  The market is moving fast right now and I don't know if I'm up to the task.  Like I've already said, this has to be a cut the loss trade now because the strike price is so far out of the money.  We'd need to see a 1000 point rise for this thing to work.  That is highly unlikely.  Stay tuned to this game because it has really gotten interesting.  Europe and Asia were both lower and they will get creamed overnight.  We'll see if this thing can at least stabilize tomorrow but anything can and will happen.