They did take the stops out on the SPX and now they have pushed back into the range. This is bullish behavior. I'll look to add on the first dip now and try to get longer once again. This has been extremely painful.

These raw numbers are not nearly as bad as expected and the market bumps higher as it's relieved. Note that we get bad revisions for prior months and this one will likely be no different, but for today, it looks good and given that we were at the edge of the cliff once more, the fact that the market didn't jump means that it is likely to run the other way once more.

The opening hour will likely be volatile once more as there is a lot of worriers out there.

With oil at new highs this morning, up another buck and a half, with the index futures in the red, with the ECB raising rates as promised and finally with more news on the way shortly on employment here - we have washout conditions in place.

Well, no sooner than I wrote about how you can use the oversold backdrop to work long positions, they hammer things much lower ... more oversold. The market is transitioning into a real monster here and this setup into the close given the backdrop of what has come before and what comes tomorrow is rather ominous. It was a bad enough setup that I went in at the end of the day and covered some of my long index positions out of fear ... and I hate to trade on fear.

The good thing about being so oversold is that it's hard for them to take them down further. That leaves so room to wade around and make a few buys and sells cause your not quite as worried that you are going to have to close the trades at a loss because your timing is off. Instead you just give it a little time knowing that the odds greatly favor you getting out at a better price than you paid (of course your timing can't be horrible to do this).

There just is no end to higher oil prices it seems. Logic would argue otherwise but each day it seems that there is just more bad news. Not enough oil to meet demand they say. Well ... maybe ... I'm not smart enough to know that. Sure seems like we are overdoing it though. Up 50% in a year. Did demand increase by 50% last year?