Up, down, up was the pattern as the Dow gained 240 points on average volume. The advance/declines were slightly positive. The summation index is now trending higher but not decidedly so. That basically means that it is moving up but without the robustness seen with other advances. That doesn't mean that things won't move higher going forward. It does mean that the rally is getting long in the tooth. GDP came in where expected and after a gap open we sold off into negative territory. However things turned around and back up we went. Still plenty of money to go around. GE was flat on average volume. Sitting on the 50 day moving average here. Gold was down $7 on the June contract and finished well above the lows for the session. The dollar was little changed and rates ticked up a bit. The XAU was off 3 1/3, while GDX lost 2/3. Volume was average for lately. Not yet completely oversold for the gold shares. If we get there I'll most likely try the GDX May calls. HOLX got clobbered on its earnings report, losing over 6 points on heavy volume. Obviously getting the calls there was the wrong idea. Thankfully my orders never got filled and I didn't make the trade at any price just to get in. You live and die by the sword trading earnings reports but the profits can be as spectacular as the losses. Trading the individual issues is much riskier than the indexes in my humble opinion. Mentally I'm feeling OK. The VIX was up despite the gains in the stock market today. That doesn't fit. It did spike up to touch the upper Bollinger band. Those bands keep contracting and something big is brewing. The short term indicators there remain mid-range. End of the month trading on tap Friday, not sure which way we'll go. I'm still hoping to see a blow off top to get some May SPY puts. Europe lower and Asia higher last night. We'll close out the trading week and month tomorrow.