It was quite a session and anyting but quiet today. The Dow fell 348 points on light volume. The advance/declines were better than 3 to 1 negative. The summation index is moving down. It could have been worse as the market was off 800 points about halfway through the day and then made a dramatic comeback. Not sure what it all means as we were on the brink of a huge collapse. Some short covering to be sure but perhaps the sellers just dried up. The smaller stock indices were on their way to testing the October lows when they abruptly turned around. The S&P 500 remains short term oversold and that's what occurs during down trends. Not sure where we go from here as things still could go either way after todays price action. We'll have to wait and see how the weeks ends tomorrow. Gold dropped $25 on the futures. The US dollar was higher and interest rates ticked up. The XAU and GDX had fractional losses after being lower earlier in the session. The gold shares followed the market back up even though gold itself didn't. Volume was about average. The gold shares outperformed the metal once again and that's a plus if you're bullish. Mentally I'm feeling OK. The VIX was up today and that fits with a decline in stocks. The VIX was much higher during the day and almost made it up to the 50 day moving average. But it fell back and lost much of its gain. Not sure what this means either but the VIX is still above the 20 level. Perhaps we are setting up for the Santa Claus rally, which involves the last 5 trading days of December coupled with the first 2 trading days of January. We'll see. For now we'll be on the sidelines until after Christmas. Asia up and Europe down overnight. We'll close out the trading week tomorrow.