The tariff tantrum returned and markets got clobbered as the Dow fell 878 points on very heavy volume. The advance/declines were shy of 6 to 1 negative. The summation index is moving down. The NASDAQ led the way down and was off 3.5%. The S&P 500 was off 2.75%. Players all headed to the exits at the same time. The S&P is no longer short term overbought and some indicators have already made it down to short term oversold. All the recent up trend lines for the S&P have been broken. Support could come in at the 50 day moving average at 6530 but we are practically there already. Selling out SPY October puts yesterday proved to be the wrong move but we did what we thought we had to at the time. If we had left the original stop loss order intact we would have been stopped out for a loss this morning when the market rallied at the open today. We've had this problem using the stops loss orders before where we've missed out on moves. However without them the losses can pile up pretty fast. Doesn't matter now. Our sell signal was valid but we are now concerned with where we go from here. I'm looking at the SPY October calls for next week. My guess is that todays tariff tension will be walked back over the weekend. Perhaps if we get some follow through selling on Monday we'll try the calls. Monday is a partial holiday in the US, so trading may be thin. Gold bounced back $57 today on the futures. The US dollar was lower along with interest rates. The XAU and GDX had fractional moves one way or the other on above average volume. The short term indicators for GDX are beginning to move sideways. Waiting to see if it breaks support at the 74 level. Mentally I'm feeling a bit frustrated. The VIX jumped today and now is above the important level of 20. Short term overbought now but not completely. The volatility implied by the tight Bollinger bands finally came to fruition today. Not sure if this is a one day event or the beginning of a sustained decline for stocks. Plenty of work to do on the charts over the weekend. Europe and Asia were down with the exception of India. It's Friday afternoon and time for a break.