Signs of Volatility Wane....02.16.16

Kicking off the week the markets are showing encouraging signs ...kind of... What we're missing is decent volume (Friday and today were about 75% par) and the VIX only faded 5% in the face of today's R2+ climb...a bit of a decoupling from expected levels.   The Traders Almanac suggests the rest of this week will be weak to down into options expiration on Friday and we are in fact at overhead resistance, difficult as that may be to believe.
Looking at the limit stop metrics panel for SPY and XLU we see that the current skew favors volatility sustained at current levels.
In the case of SPY all metrics reveal a contracting range and intraday volatility with RSQ downslope and P6 hugging the RSQ.
In the case of XLU we see a divergence between the PCL range and the open/close range, most likely reflecting the extremely overbought levels in utilities and we witnessed the instability of XLU today as it swunbg from + to - to +.