A final hour rally brought the major averages back from the brink as the Dow finished with a gain of 8 points on good volume. The advance/declines were slightly negative. The summation index continues sideways. The S&P 500 made it down 20% intraday but closed above the bear market level. It remains short term oversold. I still think that we are putting in some kind of bottom here and todays price action reinforces that view. The major averages are too far away from their 50 and 200 day moving averages to stay this low for too long. That doesn't mean that the decline is over but we should see some kind of rally or bounce at least back to one of the down trend lines. We're still looking for the S&P to reach 3600 before thinking about putting longer term money to work. Gold was up a couple bucks on the futures. The US dollar was a bit higher and interest rates a bit lower. The XAU was off 1/2, while GDX lost about a dime. Volume remains light here. Perhaps will attempt the GDX June calls but will need to see a pullback in the gold shares from here to consider it. Mentally I'm feeling OK. The VIX was up slightly on the session but dropped well off of its highs for the day. The short term indicators have made it back to mid-range so you can make a case for either direction here. Looking at the major averages it looks to me like we've put in a short term bottom today with hammers on the daily candlestick charts. The are also some potential positve RSI divergences for some of the indices. So I think that we might see some upside next week. Now if things fall apart on Monday and we close lower than todays low, I'll have to change my view. Way too many bears out there at the moment though. We'll check the charts over the weekend and go from there. Europe and Asia were higher to close out the week. It's Friday afternoon and time for a break.