The summer doldrums took a day off today as the Dow fell 260 points on good volume. The advance/declines were better than 3 to 1 negative. The summation index is moving lower. We opened with a gap lower and the Dow was off 550 points during the session. There wasn't any news to spark the sell off but perhaps the extreme overbought conditions finally came home to roost. The S&P 500 is still short term overbought but the indicators have turned back down for now. I don't think that today is the beginning of a sustained move down but I could be wrong. Perhaps we're at the start of building a top for the market. I still think that things will be held up until the July option expiration has passed. GE was off 1/8 on average volume. Gold finished little changed on the futures. The US dollar was lower and interest rates continued their decline. The XAU lost over 4 1/2, while GDX was off by 7/8. Volume was light. The gold shares followed the overall market lower. They are underperforming the price of gold and that's not a good sign for the bulls here. Mentally I'm feeling OK. The VIX spiked up today and was above the important 20 level today before pulling back. The short term technical indicators here have now turned around and are solidly pointing higher which would imply lower stock prices going forward. Obviously this indicator hasn't been giving any reliable signals in the past couple of days. Or perhaps my take on what is going on with the VIX is wrong. The TRAN got slammed today. It's been heading lower for a couple of months. Maybe this index is telling the story. However it is hard for me to get real bearish when the NASDAQ continues to make higher highs. I'm still in the mindset of waiting out the rest of the July option cycle before putting on the next trade. August options will have an extra week in them though. Europe and Asia were lower overnight. It appears that the markets know something that we do not. We'll close out the trading week tomorrow.