Well, there it is. After fighting it all week long, the bulls finally succumbed to the pressure the bears had been applying for a while. Two of the major indices broke under their currently-critical floors, and may - and I stress "may" - have finally started a long-overdue correction. In this crazy environment we can't take anything for granted. Let's just start at the beginning and point out how the S&P 500 closed under the 20-day moving average line at 1992, and broke under the horizontal floor at 1990. It hit a new multi-week low too. Oh, and the pullback unfurled on the most volume we've seen in several weeks. Take a look. To tell you the truth, were it just the S&P 500 showing us a technical breakdown, it may not be a hint worth taking. It wasn't just the S&P 500 though. The Dow Jones Industrial Average also broke under its 20-day moving average line as well as below a major horizontal support level at 17,000. There's a flipside to the story, however. While the Dow and the S&P 500 may have moved past the edge, the NASDAQ and the Russell 2000 didn't. The NASDAQ Composite, in fact, only had to touch it 20-day moving average line at 4557 before the bulls started to pile back in; the floor at 4545 was never even threatened. As for the Russell 2000, it lost the most ground today with a 1.0% selloff, but even then it didn't fall beneath a confluence of key moving average lines around 1150. Now, I didn't want to show you all these charts just to fill space; my preference is brevity. I wanted show you all four major charts to illustrate how even my bearish expectation isn't bulletproof. So why am I still leaning bearishly without a great deal of proof? I'm looking at the subtle clues. The chart you're about to see is the NYSE breadth (advancer/decliner) and depth (up volume and down volume) chart we've looked at several times in the past couple of weeks, so we're not even going to explain it today. We're just going to show it to you with the reminder that we're more interested in the overall trend lines than we are in the volatile, day-to-day data. In fact, on our image the daily data has been visibly muted while the trend lines have been highlighted. As you'll see, the advancer/decliner trend for the NYSE's stocks turned bearish today. The NYSE up volume and down volume trend hasn't crossed over into bearish territory yet, but it's clearly pointed in that direction. It bears repeating... the market's undertow tends to change direction before the market itself does. That's why I'm still planning on a September correction even though none of the indices have given us major breakdowns yet; even the S&P 500 and the Dow have more floors to break under before the floodgates open. In fact, I'm enough of a short-term pessimist here to go ahead and take some real trading action because of it. Lightening Up, But.... Like we said, the threat of a correction now is big enough for me to start shedding some of the market exposure we have in the SCN newsletter portfolio (and we didn't have much to begin with). With the addition of Columbia Banking Systems (COLB), we're now sitting on four open trades - Columbia, JC Penney (JCP), Verizon (VZ), and AES Corp. (AES). Let's go ahead and boot Verizon and AES. Neither got off to a very good start, and neither were even mildly compelling today. If the market tide is going to turn south the way I think it is, both AES and VZ look like they could lead the charge lower. I'll gladly take our small loss there now to prevent being forced to book a larger loss later; trade management is the name of this game. Anyway, the exit of two of our long trades and the potential onset of a short-term pullback will certainly prompt at least one question from our readers - what are we going to do about it? Truth be told, had a viable answer not landed in my lap today, I probably wouldn't even bring the question up. Fate can sometimes work in your favor though, so we may as well just go with the flow. For anybody who's been reading this free, end-of-day newsletter for more than a few weeks, you'll know I've got a lot more to say every day than what I actually get to tell you. Between my writing and editing duties at the website along with all the other relevant news popping up we need to dissect for our readers, we don't have a ton of time for short-term stock trading. Yeah, we've got four open trades right now, but that's not many; sometimes we have none. And, even if we had time to dole out more trading ideas, it still may not do you a lot of good. One of the other realities I've talked to you about before is, since this newsletter isn't published until after the market closes, it's difficult - and often impossible - for us to make effective swing-trading recommendations. It's not that we don't have the know-how and talent on staff here. It's just that short-term trading almost requires you to make intraday trading decisions; most of the gains seem to be made between one trading day and the next when markets are closed. So what's this got to do with anything? It's kind of funny, but in this afternoon's edition of the Elite Opportunity newsletter, John Monroe explained how that service was upgrading its structure and delivery. As of today, the EO service is going to utilize its daily newsletter and text-messaging platform to focus on short-term swing trading ideas. I suspect subscribers we'll see more of them, and with more clarity. [In fact, we've already kind of seen this happen over the past few days in the Elite Opportunity service.] This will include individual stock trading ideas - bearish and bullish - as well as index-based trades... usually through index-based ETFs. This doesn't mean the longer-term trades John has been suggesting are going away. In fact, they'll also be initiated and followed in the newsletter as needed. Being long-term positions, however, it makes sense to leave them alone as much as possible and instead focus on the near-term stuff that truly does require day-to-day attention. But again, what's this got to do with anything? It's my long way of saying the Elite Opportunity service is far better equipped to give you short-term swing trading ideas than I ever could be, given the structure and focus of this free newsletter. For that matter, he's probably even going to be able to give you more longer-term stock ideas too. I think the EO currently has nine long-term trades in its portfolio, and come Monday, we'll only have two left. On the chance that I've made matters more confusing instead of more clear, here's my advice - sign up for a free two week trial to the Elite Opportunity newsletter. It won't take long to see what I mean about how John distinguishes between short-term and long-term trading. It also won't take long to see how becoming an EO member is an upgrade to your subscription to this end-of-day newsletter... though you can still get both. Here's how, or cut and paste this link: https://www.smallcapnetwork.com/?vmpd_ckstr[click_track]=Newsletter&vmpd_ckstr_redirect=/pages/SCNEO/v1/ Oh, and by the way, we know some of you are also new shareholders of Staffing 360 Solutions (STAF). The company's going to be hosting a conference call on Tuesday. James Brumley gave us all the details today in this commentary.