The Dow got pounded today as the trade war between the US and China heated up.  The most watched index fell 617 points on good volume.  The advance/declines were 5 to 1 negative.  The summation index is moving lower.  The positive price action and candlesticks from the previous two sessions were negated.  Moving average support has been broken now on many indices.  The S&P 500 is just about at the next support of 2800.  But RUT looks like it wants to head lower and there is still room on the short term technical indicators to move down.  RUT is generally a leader one way or the other.  The market is now hostage to the trade headlines and they are negative at the moment.  If there would be some kind of positive break through, we'd see a nice rally.  But it doesn't look like that is in the cards as the hard-liners have taken over the narrative.  Perhaps we move a bit lower before an oversold bounce but that's a guess as usual.  GE dropped 1/4 on average volume.  Gold finally found some buyers and was up $13 on the futures.  The US dollar finished little changed.  The XAU added 1 1/2, while GDX rose 2/3.  Volume was heavy.  Finally a flight to safety on the trade war news.  Plenty of room on the technical indicators here to go higher.  No trades in mind for me here yet though.  Mentally I'm feeling a bit distracted as I have a medical procedure scheduled for Thursday so my mind is not in the right place to trade.  The game really needs your full attention to be successful.  I don't have that now.  4 days left in the May option cycle.  Whatever I had thought about market direction is now confirmed wrong after todays price action.  The market does not look like it will hold up as I had planned and new all time highs are now off the table.  Even though nothing has fundamentally changed in the past week, we cannot ignore the price action.  We're at the mercy of the next headline or quote out of the US or China.  That is a tough way to make a living.  My mind isn't completely in the game here anyway so I'll be on the sidelines until further notice.  Getting oversold on the stock indexes but not there yet.  Europe and Asia were lower overnight with the exception of Hong Kong.  We'll see what kind of rhetoric shows up overnight.