Mild gains today as the Dow rose 130 points on light volume. The advance/declines were positive. The summation index continues higher. The employment data came in about where expected. We had a rally, then a sell off and another rally into the close. The NASDAQ barely led the way higher. The S&P 500 did close above the resistance at 4600. It still remains short term overbought with a possible negative divergence on the daily RSI. We are not looking at the SPY December calls anymore with a week to go in the December option cycle. Gold dropped $25 on the futures. The US dollar was higher along with interest rates. The XAU fell 1 3/8, while GDX shed almost 2/3. Volume was good to the downside. The gold shares had a bearish week led by the one day downside reversal on Monday. That should have been our cue to exit the GDX December call trade. But it was poorly managed by me once again. I dumped the calls today for a 55% loss. We have now seen GDX close below the neckline of the inverse head and shoulders pattern that had a valid breakout last week. So there is the likelyhood that the pattern will be negated and the breakout was false. It happens. The short term indicators for GDX are now mid-range. If they do make it down to oversold we'll probably try the GDX January calls as the January option cycle has an extra week in it. But that doesn't cancel the fact that the recent GDX trade had a nice profit that I failed to capture. We were looking for the 34 level for GDX and it did not even make it to 32. Mentally I'm feeling frustrated as we chalk up another losing trade. I suppose the short term goal now is to try and not do anything stupid next week. But win or lose moving on is next thing to do. The VIX was down to close at the lowest level on the year. Still short term oversold but not at extremes. The VIX is still implying higher stock prices to come. We've got inflation data and the Fed next week so there will be plenty of excuses for the markets to move. I would expect things to quiet down after that with the holidays coming up towards the end of the month. Asia was mixed and Europe higher to close out the week. It's Friday afternoon and time for a break.