Sellers continue to have the upper hand as the Dow fell 180 points on light volume. The advance/declines were shy of 3 to 1 negative. The summation index is heading down. The NASDAQ was the leader today and that's a negative. Now it appears that we'll just having selling into the expiration on Friday as buyers seem unwilling to step up to the plate. Still short term oversold and staying that way for the major averages. It looks like we missed our chance for the SPY August puts this time around. We'll be looking for the September puts going forward. But we'll have to at least wait for some kind of bounce. However the path of least resistance is lower until proven otherwise. Gold was off a dozen on the futures. The US dollar continues to climb along with interest rates. The XAU fell 1 1/2, while GDX shed 1/3. Volume remains very light here as there is no interest in buying the gold shares. Short term oversold on all the indicators for GDX. I did place an overnight order for the GDX September calls and I'm leaving it out there. If GDX gets down to 27 this order should be filled. If we don't try the calls here with an obvious oversold condition then when would we try them? But the 50 day moving average is crossing below the 200 day moving average and that is the implied kiss of death for GDX. Mentally I'm feeling OK. The VIX was up slightly today. Not yet overbought here so there is still room for the VIX to advance. The path of least resistance here seems to be up which would imply more volatility. We are in the midst of a summer swoon in the stock market. How low will it go? We can make a case for 4200 on the S&P 500 but hopefully not in a straight line. As usual the market knows much more than we do. Foreign markets closed generally lower. We'll see if the selling continues tomorrow.