More of the same lackluster price movement although the Dow did have a decent gain of 172 points on light volume. The advance/declines were negative. The summation index is moving up. The S&P 500 finished flat and the NASDAQ posted a small loss. The S&P has stalled here for the past couple of sessions. I am thinking about the SPY May puts and if we see some upside tomorrow I might make the trade. The S&P 500 is short term overbought on some of the indicators. If I don't try this idea by the end of this week, I might try it next week on Monday ahead of the inflation data. However I'm not looking at huge decline in the cards for the market. It would be short term trade at best. Gold was off $8 on the futures. The US dollar was slightly higher along with interest rates. Both the XAU and GDX finished flat again on light volume. We haven't seen any real selling in the gold shares with gold weaker in the past couple of days. That's a plus. I might try the GDX May calls if we get oversold but that idea is fading as we are running out of time. But we can't rule it out yet for perhaps next week. Mentally I'm feeling OK. The VIX continues to drop and remains short term oversold. The VIX can sometimes stay oversold for quite a while and it appears that we may be in one of those times. That's one of the reasons against trying the SPY puts here. We don't have all the indicators lined up for this idea but we do have enough that it might be worth the risk. Obviously the trading is never easy. Europe up and Asia down overnight. We'll keep an eye on tonights developments.