Down we go as the stock market got hammered today as interest rates continue to rise. The Dow lost 559 points on very heavy volume. The advance/declines were around 7 to 1 negative. The summation index is now moving down with conviction. The bears are taking control. The overall market was weaker than the Dow with the NASDAQ leading the way lower. It has been for the past couple of weeks and closed below its 50 day moving average. My idea for the S&P 500 to join the Dow with a new all time high soon was wrong. The S&P 500 is heading down and is not yet short term oversold. The positive effect from the earlier short term upside reversal this week has been negated. Volatility has ramped up and now we can look for lower prices going forward. GE was off 1/3 and the volume was good. Gold dropped thirty bucks on the futures and the US dollar was slightly higher. The XAU fell 6 points, while GDX shed 1 1/3. Volume was good. Oversold for the gold shares but the fundamentals are not in its favor right now. I am looking at the GDX calls as usual but not in a hurry to put any trades on here. Mentally I'm feeling OK. The VIX, which I thought was exhausted, came back to life. It had a big spike higher to close above its 200 day moving average. It is not short term overbought yet. This implies that there will be more downside in the market to go. Not sure what the last day of the month trading will bring but it probably won't be boring. Perhaps I'll wait for the SPY to get to oversold and maybe try the March calls then. Today was a pretty negative session that was not expected in my view. After things turned back up earlier this week, it seemsed like it was all things on go to the upside. But that is not the case. I'm back in the cautious camp for now and glad that I didn't try any calls this week. Asia was higher and Europe lower overnight. We'll see how we finish out the week and month tomorrow.