Stocks got clobbered today as the Dow fell 542 points on heavy volume. The advance/declines were better than 2 to 1 negative. The summation index is heading down. The employment report came in weaker than expected and some earnings were a disappointment. For now it looks like any rally can be shorted. The NASDAQ led the way lower and that is not a good sign for the bulls. The short term indicators for the S&P 500 have rolled over with room to go. We will look for a strong rally out of nowhere in order to try the SPY August puts at some point next week. We have missed the ideal entry for this trade though. However at least we know that our ideas are on the right track. Gold rallied in a flight to safety as the futures gained $64. The US dollar was lower along with interest rates. The XAU gained 2 1/4, while GDX added 3/4. Volume was average. The short term indicators for GDX are trying to turn back up. I'm now looking st the GDX September calls as a possible trade. We'll see. Mentally I'm feeling a bit tired. The VIX shot up today and closed above the 20 level. It is now also above both its 50 and 200 day moving averages. The short term indicators here are moving up and some have room to go before getting overbought. It appears that the tight Bollinger bands on the VIX implied a move higher for this indicator. It was quite a week for the markets and we were expecting some kind of fireworks with all the data coming out. But the most important thing now is where we go from here and how do we capitalize on it? Certainly we will expect more selling to occur. I'll be going over all the charts this weekend in an attempt to find the best opportunity. Asia and Europe finished down as we had a worldwide head to the exits. It's Friday afternoon and time for a break.