Another day of hanging around for the Dow as it dropped 39 points on lighter volume. The advance/declines were around 2 to 1 negative. The summation index is moving up. The overall market was weaker than the Dow with the NASDAQ leading the way lower. We'll see if that means something in the coming days. Retail sales came in about where expected. The S&P 500 remains short term overbought. We've reached an area of congestion here. It is either a consolidation before moving higher or a short term top. No way for me to tell right now which way it's going to go. The up trend line for the S&P remains intact. The Russell 2000 was the weakest link today and that may be more telling. Gold finished flat on the day. The US dollar was lower along with interest rates. The XAU fell a point, while GDX lost about 1/3. Volume was light. Not a lot of sellers and that's a positive for now. We're still waiting for a pullback in the gold shares to try the GDX calls again. Patience for now. Mentally I'm feeling OK. The VIX was lower today which doesn't fit again with a down market. We've come up from being extremely short term oversold. It looks to me like the VIX wants to turn back down here implying higher stock prices in the near term. But I've been off trying to figure out the VIX lately. Haven't really seen the usual positive expiration week bias in the market just yet. Not sure what the lack of volume today means going forward either. Always plenty of questions searching for answers in this game. Asia mixed and Europe lower overnight. We'll keep an eye on tonights developments.