SPY closed Friday at $747.03, up 0.72%, session range $737.68 to $748.90. QQQ closed at $687.99, up 0.65%, session range $680.05 to $695.77. Neither chart looks like anything happened this week. That’s the strange part. Trading earnings season price action starts with admitting that the calmest close of the week followed the loudest four days I’ve marked in a month, and the lines don’t remember the noise — only where price actually stopped.
Markets are closed today. This is the weekend read: what Friday’s close actually said, and what a week where more than a quarter of the S&P 500 reports means for a chart that only cares about levels.
Friday’s green close sits on top of a week that didn’t behave
Wednesday the Fed held and the market sold off. Thursday GDP and Core PCE hit the tape and both tickers reversed hard the other direction. Friday, nothing — a 0.72% grind higher on SPY, 0.65% on QQQ, the kind of day that wouldn’t make anyone’s watchlist on its own. Put those three sessions next to each other and the market spent a week getting shoved from both directions and finished it almost exactly where the 10-day range says it’s been trading all along: SPY’s 10-day range is $729.10 to $750.02, and Friday’s $747.03 close sits three dollars off the top of it. QQQ’s 10-day range runs $661.14 to $710.05, with Friday’s $687.99 close comfortably in the upper half.
That’s a market that absorbed a rate decision and a GDP surprise inside two trading days and ended the week almost unchanged from where it would have closed if neither had happened. I’m not going to pretend that’s a small thing. It’s the whole lesson, actually — react to a single red day the way Wednesday’s selloff made a lot of people react, and you’d have missed that the week was going to round-trip back near its highs by Friday. The chart didn’t need me to have an opinion about the Fed or GDP to end up exactly where the range already said it could go.
What earnings season price action actually gives a level trader
Next week is one of the heaviest earnings weeks of the year — more than a quarter of the S&P 500 reports between Monday and Friday. Palantir, ON Semiconductor, and Grab report Monday. AMD, Opendoor, Booking, and Caterpillar report Tuesday. Uber, McDonald’s, and Disney report Wednesday. Datadog, DraftKings, Cloudflare, and Trade Desk report Thursday. Berkshire Hathaway, Take-Two, Under Armour, and Wendy’s close it out Friday.
I have no opinion on any of it. Not whether AMD beats, not whether Disney’s streaming numbers look good, not whether Palantir’s guidance impresses anyone. That’s not a disclaimer — it’s the actual point. A blank chart doesn’t have a view on an earnings call it hasn’t seen yet, and neither do I.
What a week like this does give me is something more useful than a prediction: fresh levels. A stock that gaps hard the morning after reporting doesn’t just move — it leaves an unfilled gap and a fresh open price sitting on the chart, a level that didn’t exist the day before. Those levels get tested. Sometimes the same afternoon, sometimes weeks later, but a gap from a heavy earnings week has a way of showing back up on the chart long after the headline that created it is forgotten. Every one of those Monday-through-Friday reports is going to leave lines behind, whether the stock beats or misses, whether it gaps up or down. The print is the event. The gap is the artifact. I only trade the artifact.
Which gaps hold and which get filled
My whole approach to a week this dense isn’t picking which earnings report to have an opinion on — it’s watching which gaps hold and which get filled quickly once the dust settles. A gap that holds for two or three sessions after the report is a level the market has actually agreed to defend. A gap that fills within a day or two was noise the algorithm produced on the open before real buyers and sellers had a say. I don’t know in advance which is which. Nobody does, and anyone telling you otherwise on Monday morning about a report that happens Monday morning is guessing with more confidence than the situation deserves.
So the process doesn’t change from any other week: mark what’s real after it happens, not before. I’m not pre-drawing a level where I think PLTR or AMD might gap to based on where I think the report goes. I wait for the gap to print, mark the open and the pre-gap close as two separate lines, and then watch what price does with them over the sessions that follow. A gap fill within a day tells me one thing. A gap that survives a full week and gets defended on a pullback tells me something completely different, and it’s the second one that tends to be worth trading.
Friday’s jobs report is the other half of the week
Earnings aren’t the only catalyst. The July jobs report lands Friday, August 7, at 8:30 AM ET — the consensus estimate is around 87,500 jobs added, up from 57,000 the prior month, with unemployment expected to tick up to 4.3% from 4.2%. That’s a real number I don’t have yet, so I’m not going to pretend to know how the market reacts to it. What I do know is that it lands on the same Friday as Berkshire, Take-Two, Under Armour, and Wendy’s reporting, which means the last session of the week has an economic release and a fresh batch of earnings gaps to sort through at the same time. That’s not a week to have a strong opinion walking in. It’s a week to have a short list of levels and the patience to watch which ones get honored once the actual numbers hit.
This is the same discipline I lean on any week the calendar gets loaded — mark levels, watch more, trade less, let the noise resolve itself before deciding what was real. A week with five earnings days and a jobs report on top of it is that principle at its most tested, not its exception.
What I’m actually watching Monday through Friday
Monday: ISM Manufacturing at 10:00 AM ET, plus Palantir, ON Semiconductor, and Grab reporting. I’m not trading the print. I’m watching whether any gap that opens holds through the first hour or gets erased by lunch.
Tuesday: AMD, Opendoor, Booking, and Caterpillar report. Four separate gap candidates in one session. I’ll mark what actually prints and leave the rest of the chart alone.
Wednesday: ADP and ISM Services in the morning, then Uber, McDonald’s, and Disney after the bell. A data morning and an earnings evening on the same day — I give both time to settle before trusting a level test off either one.
Thursday: Datadog, DraftKings, Cloudflare, and Trade Desk report. By Thursday I’ve usually got two or three gaps from earlier in the week that either held or didn’t, and that history tells me more about how the market’s treating this earnings season than any single Thursday print will.
Friday: the jobs report at 8:30, then Berkshire, Take-Two, Under Armour, and Wendy’s to close the week. Whatever gaps survived Monday through Thursday get their real test against a fresh macro number on the same morning.
Same rule, heavier week
SPY closed at $747.03. QQQ closed at $687.99. Both near the top of where they’ve traded over the past 10 sessions, both sitting there after a week that included an FOMC selloff and a GDP rally in the same 48 hours. None of that chaos needed me to be right about the Fed or GDP to resolve the way it did. It just needed lines and patience.
Next week won’t be quieter. It’ll have more names on the tape reporting than any other week this year, and a jobs report closing it out. My job through all of it stays exactly the same size it always is: mark what price actually does, not what I think an earnings call means for a stock. The gaps will tell me which ones the market believes. I just have to wait for them to say so.
I mark levels and watch gaps hold or fail through weeks exactly like this one, live in Static, the free daily chart room run by Draw Lines Make Money. If trading earnings season price action without guessing a single print sounds like your kind of week, you’re welcome to sit in and watch how the lines get treated as the reports roll in:
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