Lower today as the Dow lost 130 points on good volume. The advance/declines were negative. The Dow was off over 350 at one point today. The summation index is still in a sideways range. We had a huge gap down on the open today but the indexes managed to hold support for now. The overall market was weaker than the Dow again with the NASDAQ leading the way lower. I sold my SPY September puts early on and reaped a gain of just over 300%. The exit could have been a bit better but it was a good trade nonetheless. Doesn't matter now though as you must always keep moving forward in the game. Expiration Friday tomorrow and I won't be attempting anything there. I sitll think that we're heading lower from here. GE continued to move higher as it gained 1/3 on extremely heavy volume again. Gold lost some ground, the futures there were off a dozen. The US dollar was lower as well. The XAU dropped 2 points, while GDX shed 3/4. Volume here remains light. I am still looking at the GDX October calls and that may be the next trade in line for me. Not close to short term oversold there but GDX is holding its 50 day moving average. Mentally I'm feeling OK. The VIX spiked up early on the gap down in stocks. However it eroded those gains during the session and finished with just a small move higher. Still oversold on some of the short term indicators for the VIX. The market had a chance to fall apart today but it didn't. The question is whether the lows of the bear flag will hold as they did today or was this just something option expiration related? My guess is the latter, as I believe that were going to head down to at least 3200 on the S&P 500 before this decline is over. I could be wrong and often am. Europe and Asia were both lower overnight. We'll see how expiration Friday goes tomorrow.