The Dow closed down -108.13 (-0.77%) at 13,927.54 on news that the Fed may need to halt QE3 before the jobs market heals.

From the January FOMC meeting minutes released today, the Federal Reserve may have to slow or stop buying bonds before seeing the pickup in hiring the bold program is designed to deliver.

Personally, I think that would be a ways off. However, and more importantly (to me anyway), the news did deliver a jump to the VIX which has been really low and is up +19% to 14.65 today. This could be what the market needs to start grinding higher, or maybe not. I don’t know.

If it looks like a pullback already, I’ll trim longs. But I’m still thinking (with a lot of hopium) that we grind higher to Tax Day.

Tomorrow we have earnings from Wal-Mart and Hewlett-Packard.

Dow stocks higher today (6 of them) include MRK +1.04%, VZ +0.94%, WMT +0.65%, BA +0.17%, KO +0.16% and MCD +0.06%.

Losing Dow stocks were led by AA -3.31%, BAC -3.20%, UNH -2.56%, CAT -2.49%, DIS -2.03% and JPM -1.70%.