The Dow got clobbered today to begin the trading week but that was mostly due to an earnings miss for GS. The most watched index fell 391 points on average volume. The advance/declines were slightly positive. The summation index is moving higher. The overall market was much stronger than the Dow, with the NASDAQ posting a small gain. The S&P 500 had a small loss and remains short term overbought. I am looking at the SPY January puts here but haven't decided if a trade here is worth the risk. With only three days left in the January option cycle, obviously this would be an extremely short term trade. We do have producer inflation data out tomorrow morning. I was thinking about getting the puts ahead of the Beige book release in the afternoon. However the prudent thing to do is to wait for a decent technical signal as we move forward. I'm thinking that I just want to put on a trade because I haven't in a while and that would probably be a recipe for disastor. We'll see. The S&P is stalling at the long term down trend line. Gold was off ten bucks on the futures. The US dollar was slightly higher and bonds were mixed. The XAU dropped 4 1/2, while GDX shed 1 1/8. Volume was good to the downside. The gold shares underperformed the metal today and that's a negative. Still overbought for the gold shares. The short term up trend line for GDX comes in at 30 1/2 which is a point away. We'll at least wait to see what happens if we get there. A throw back to the former resistance at 30 might be a spot to try the calls. Mentally I'm feeling OK. The VIX was up today but did close below the 20 level. Still short term oversold here and below the 50 day moving average. We would have to see the VIX finish the week above the 20 level to alter our view of higher stock prices going forward. With the small stocks holding up here we still think that the path of least resitance is higher overall. But that doesn't mean we can't see a near term drop before heading back up. Europe was higher and Asia mixed overnight. We'll see what tomorrow brings.