The market sold off early and tried to come back for the rest of the session. The Dow fell 119 points on heavy volume. The advance/declines were 2 to 1 negative. The summation index is starting to try and move lower. The positive expiration week bias did not occur. The Dow was off over three hundred points early on. Like a broken record the overall market was weaker than the Dow with the NASDAQ leading the way down. The short term technical indicators for the S&P 500 are starting to roll over. I was looking for higher prices for the S&P this week and it didn't happen. My take on things hasn't been correct for a while now with respect to both the overall market and the gold shares. It's probably time for me to head to the sidelines for a while. GE lost around 1/4 on light volume. Gold bounced around today and finished little changed. The US dollar was lower. The XAU dropped 1 3/4, while GDX shed 3/8. Volume was light. The earnings that came out today for the gold shares didn't do much. I sold my remaining GDX February calls for a 90% loss. Not a lot of money involved but a loss is a loss. Trading with such a short time left in the option cycle is not advised and it isn't my normal trading routine. The gold shares are now both short and medium term oversold. Will I attempt the March calls here when it makes technical sense? Perhaps but I'll let the week end tomorrow and see how I feel about things then. The fundamental picture for gold is not positive at the moment. Mentally I'm feeling a bit tired, did not sleep well. The VIX had a spike up but did close back beneath the 50 day moving average. The oversold technical indicators are beginning to try and turn back up. As long as the VIX doesn't close above the 50 day, I have to believe that the market will be OK here and not have a dramatic drop. We've just had a pretty good run up for stocks so a pause would not be out of the question. However I'm not sure about five or ten percent correction at this time. We'll see how things play out going forward. Europe and Asia were lower overnight. We'll close out the week tomorrow.