Another mixed bag today as the Dow fell 69 points on good volume. The advance/declines were slightly positive. The summation index is moving up. The NASDAQ was the relative leader today after being the laggard yesterday. The Russell 2000 had a good session as the small stocks are leading the way. There was no downside follow through for the small stocks and that's a plus. We're still short term overbought for the major stock indices. The roll over of the technical indicators for some of the indexes did not continue today. The trend still remains up until proven otherwise. GE was off a few cents and the volume was good. Gold finished little changed and the US dollar was lower. The XAU and GDX had fractional moves one way or the other on light volume. I did place an overnight order for some GDX January calls. It was not filled and will take some more decline to get triggered. I'll consider canceling it before the weekend. Mentally I'm feeling OK. The VIX was higher today and the short term indicators here are still pointing up. Option expiration week is almost upon us and we'll look for the usual positive bias. I'll be looking for new all time highs again. The bearish engulfing candlestick pattern on the S&P 500 daily chart has yet to manifest itself. It would need to do so in a hurry to be valid. I don't have any SPY trades in mind for now. I haven't gotten a clear short term technical signal one way or the other here. The longer term sell signal remains out there from one of the reliable indicators. Unfortunately the timing there can be a month early. It's already been a couple of weeks since triggered so perhaps it isn't going to work this time around. Time will tell. Europe and Asia were mixed overnight. We'll close out the week tomorrow.