Lower to begin a summer week in August as the Dow dropped 643 points on light volume. The advance/declines were 5 to 1 negative. The summation index has turned around and is now moving lower. The summer rally is taking a break. Is it over for good? We'll know more as time goes on. The short term indicators for the S&P 500 have rolled over but aren't yet oversold. There is an up trend line there that comes in around the 50 day moving average. That would be a logical place for the selling to stop and we've only had a couple of days down. The NASDAQ led the way down and that's a negative. 200 day moving averages proved to be barriers. We'll see how it goes from here. Gold fell $15 on the futures. The US dollar was higher along with interest rates. The XAU and GDX had slight fractional moves one way or the other on very light volume. GDX has reached short term oversold but it would be very hard to try the calls here with all the fundamentals going against it. The gold shares holding up with a drop in gold today is bullish though. However a rising dollar along with higher interest rates doesn't fit with gold moving up. The trading is never easy. Mentally I'm feeling OK. The VIX jumped today and one of the short term indicators is already overbought after remaining oversold for weeks. This implies that the decline will be short lived but we'll see about that. The VIX was turned back at its 200 day moving average and that's a plus for the bulls. However the downside channel that formed in the daily chart has been violated to the upside so that pattern has reached its conclusion. What we can say with certanty is that the market has reached a turning point. Europe and Asia were lower to begin the week as well. We'll keep an eye on the after hours developments.