Labor Day Closed: PPI and CPI Are This Week’s Test
No chart today. Markets are closed for Labor Day, and there’s a strange relief in that. No candle forming, no level to defend, nothing to react to. Just the lines I already drew, sitting there, waiting for Tuesday.
I used to hate days like this. Early on, a closed market felt like wasted time — like the trade was happening somewhere without me. Now it feels like the one day I’m allowed to just look at what’s already on the screen instead of adding to it.
What Friday actually left behind
Friday was jobs report day, and the reaction told me more than the number itself did. SPY closed at $770.19, down 0.39% from Thursday’s $773.17 — giving back a piece of the rally that built earlier in the week. QQQ closed at $718.96, up 0.18% from Thursday’s $717.67, essentially flat.
Two indexes, two different stories, and neither of them dramatic. SPY pulled back toward a level. QQQ held one. That’s the whole read. I’m not assigning meaning beyond what the price did — the levels from last week are the levels I’ll be watching when the session reopens, nothing more.
Tuesday and Wednesday: nothing to prove
There’s no major scheduled data through Tuesday and Wednesday. I’m treating both as quiet days — the kind where price drifts near existing structure without a reason to break it. A quiet day isn’t a signal. It’s just a quiet day. The temptation is to manufacture a story out of low-volume chop. I’m not doing that this week.
Thursday and Friday are the real test
PPI lands Thursday, September 10. CPI lands Friday, September 11. That’s the actual event risk this week — everything before it is positioning.
Both prints sit ahead of the FOMC meeting on September 15-16, and the Fed is already in its quiet period — no public remarks from officials between now and the decision. That silence changes how the market treats the data. Without a Fed voice to soften or sharpen the read, the numbers get interpreted raw, by price, in real time. No forecast figures are available yet for either report, and I’m not going to invent a range just to sound prepared. When they print, the chart will tell me what the market decided they meant. Not before.
What I’m actually doing today
Reviewing lines. That’s it. The $770 area on SPY, the level QQQ held near $719 — I mark where price respected something last week and leave it alone until price comes back to test it again. No prediction about what PPI or CPI does to those levels. I don’t know, and pretending to know is how the indicators crept back onto my chart the first time.
The work on a closed day isn’t excitement. It’s just making sure the lines I trust on Tuesday are the same ones I trusted on Friday, for the same reasons.
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