For any of you who thought every single trading day of my life was flawless and superb, let me say, today has stunk so far. I lost a fair chunk of cash on a long SSO position. I got into my index puts way too late. And I've gotten knocked out of about a dozen long positions. Yuck!

Bear though I am, even I am amazed how we keep going lower. Even some of the most bearish of the bearish folks that I read have been in agreement that we're at/near a bottom, but it seems that a floor simply cannot be found.

Looking at the SPY with Fibonacci extensions below, you can see we're in a bit of a no man's land.

If we get a real washout, there's still a long way to go. A different view, this time with the $SPX directly, suggests a bounce at about 941.43.

My misadventure with SSO was a total debacle, and I've been stopped out of about a dozen long positions.

Sheesh. I thought we were done with this. Back into NDX and RUT puts.

You probably remember the movie Poltergeist. After the haunting seems to be out of the house and everyone has calmed down, the malignant forces return. The little girl has a forlorn look in your eyes and says, "No more…….." That's how I'm starting to feel about this market. My puts are enjoying it, but my big SSO position has gone bye-bye. Ugh.

What I'm expecting for a while (with "a while" being wholly unknown, although I hope it's not "quite a few minutes!") is:

• A calming market
• A dwindling VIX
• The elimination of a need to be armed for battle from open to close

The perfect storm for bears is coming later. It might take a few months to get here. For the immediate moment, I'm going to be doing something very simple: buying SSO to take advantage of the ride up. It's clean, there's no reason to fuss about the volatility premium, and it's super-liquid.

The buying public has to get some modicum of trust and comfort back. It's going to take a little while for these wounds to heal.