Bouncing back to close out the week as the Dow gained 226 points on light volume. The advance/declines were better than 2 to 1 positive. The summation index is still heading down. An oversold bounce or the beginning of a new leg up to all time highs? I'm going with the former for now as I do believe a long awaited decline in stocks has begun. The short term technical indicators have turned back up for the S&P though. I'm looking at the SPY September puts and will most likely be getting some next week. Could I be wrong here? Of course but we'll have to see how things pan out as we move forward. Gold was off a couple bucks on the futures. Interest rates were basically unchanged while the US dollar was bit lower. The XAU and GDX had fractional moves one way or the other on light volume. My open order for the GDX October calls remains out there. GDX remains both short and medium term oversold. It is at its lower Bollinger band on both the daily and weekly basis. Mentally I'm feeling tired. The VIX had a steep drop today and is back below the important level of 20. The short term indicators here have rolled over as well. The VIX seems to be saying that the decline is over but that is just my interpretation of the indicator. Markets go where they want. I'll be keeping an eye on the VIX as usual. The McClellan oscillator reached a very oversold reading yesterday so the price action today wasn't something unexpected. If the oscillator simply continues to go up from here and gets back into positive territory, my negative thesis of what's about to take place will be wrong. This is another indicator that we'll be keeping a close eye on. We're rolling into the September options cycle and it has the usual four week duration. We'll see what type of opportunities await. Asia lower and Europe higher to close out the week. We'll check the charts over the weekend and come up with next weeks game plan. For now it's Friday afternoon and time for a rest.