SPY and QQQ today did the opposite of yesterday, and did it hard. SPY closed at $741.69, up 1.68%. QQQ closed at $683.55, up 3.30%, one of the stronger single-day moves it’s put up all month. Twenty-four hours after a Fed hold produced a red day across both tickers, the market turned around and ran the other direction. GDP and inflation data hit the wire at 8:30 this morning. By the time I pulled the chart up mid-morning, SPY and QQQ were already pushing higher, and they never really looked back.
I’m not going to tell you what the GDP print or the Core PCE number actually came in at. I don’t have that number in front of me, and I’m not going to guess at one just to sound informed. What I have is the chart, and the chart said enough on its own today.
SPY’s session and why the range matters more than the percentage
SPY’s session ran from $734.59 to $742.45, and the close at $741.69 sat almost at the top of that range. That’s not a stock that rallied and gave part of it back into the bell. That’s a stock that closed near its high, with buyers still in control when the session ended. Against the 10-day range of $729.10 to $750.02, today’s close puts SPY back in the upper half of where it’s traded over the past two weeks — a real distance from Wednesday’s post-FOMC low near $729.10, the level I marked off yesterday’s selloff. That’s the part worth sitting with. Yesterday’s session low is still on my chart. Today’s rally never came close to testing it. Price didn’t need to revisit where it broke down to find buyers again — it just reversed, cleanly, on volume that showed up right when the data hit.
QQQ’s move was the bigger story of SPY and QQQ today
QQQ closed at $683.55, up 3.30%, with a session range of $673.30 to $685.12. A 3% day in an index product is not a small move. Stack it against the 10-day range of $661.14 to $710.05 and QQQ closed today well above where it sat after Wednesday’s FOMC close at $661.73 — roughly 3.3% higher than yesterday’s low, all of it recovered in a single session. SPY up 1.68%, QQQ up 3.30% — tech-heavy exposure leading the recovery by almost double the index’s pace, which is the mirror image of what happened yesterday, when QQQ’s 2.04% decline outpaced SPY’s 1.54% drop to the downside. Same relationship, opposite direction. Whatever drove yesterday’s selling drove today’s buying harder in the same ticker.
How a level trader reads a trend day like this one
A day like today is a different animal than the choppy, range-bound sessions where this method usually earns its keep. When price gaps and runs in one direction from the open, there’s no clean level to buy a pullback into — the pullbacks barely show up. Chasing the first leg of a move like this isn’t a level trade. It’s a guess dressed up as conviction, and I don’t take those. What I did instead was watch whether the levels price reclaimed on the way up actually held once it got there. SPY moving back above the range it broke down through yesterday is one thing on the open. It’s another thing entirely by the close, once that same territory got tested from above and didn’t give way. That’s the tell on a trend day — not the size of the move, but whether the ground it retook stays retaken into the bell. Today it did, on both tickers.
Yesterday to today: the whole reason this account doesn’t hold a macro opinion
Yesterday the Fed held rates at 3.50-3.75% on a 9-3 vote, and the market sold off anyway — SPY down 1.54%, QQQ down 2.04%. Today, on a morning of GDP and inflation data with no confirmed print in front of me, both tickers ripped back the other way, QQQ harder than SPY. Twenty-four hours. A full reversal of sentiment, in both direction and magnitude. That’s exactly why I don’t carry an opinion about where the market “should” be heading from one session into the next. Anyone who was confidently bearish after yesterday’s close got run over by lunch today. Anyone confidently bullish this morning before 8:30 had no way of knowing GDP and PCE would land the way the tape reacted to them. The lines on my chart don’t care what I believed yesterday. They just sit where price stopped, and they wait to see if it comes back.
Tomorrow is quiet, and quiet is its own setup
Friday, July 31, brings the Employment Cost Index at 8:30 AM ET, Chicago PMI at 9:45, and revised UoM Consumer Sentiment with inflation expectations at 10:00. All medium or low impact. No high-impact release on the calendar. After a week that included an FOMC decision and a GDP/PCE morning, tomorrow is the first quiet session in three days. A quiet day after two loud ones isn’t nothing, either — it’s a different kind of opportunity. Fewer headline risks means fewer excuses for price to blow through a level on nothing but a surprise number. If SPY and QQQ hold the ground they retook today into tomorrow’s calmer tape, that’s a stronger signal than if they’d held it during a high-impact morning where anything could have moved them. Quiet days are when levels actually get to prove themselves instead of getting swept by a headline. I’ll be watching whether today’s reclaimed territory still holds when nothing is forcing the issue.
What’s on my chart heading into Friday
Yesterday’s post-FOMC lows — SPY’s $729.10, QQQ’s $661.14 — are still marked. They didn’t get retested today, and that’s meaningful on its own; a level that isn’t touched during a 3% rally day is a level that’s still respected. Today’s session highs, $742.45 on SPY and $685.12 on QQQ, are new lines now too. If tomorrow’s quiet session lets price sit above both today’s highs and yesterday’s lows without much drama, that’s a range with real structure behind it. If it doesn’t, the lines will tell me that instead. I don’t need to know what Friday’s Employment Cost Index prints to have a plan for it. I need to know where price has already agreed to stop, and let tomorrow’s calmer tape decide whether that agreement holds.
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