I’m writing this Saturday morning. The screens are dark, the week is done, and I’d rather mark it now while the shape of it is still fresh than wait for Monday and let it blur into whatever comes next.
Five days. Four of them closed green in a row. The fifth one is the one I want to be careful about, because Friday’s data feed hadn’t fully settled by the time I sat down to write this, and I’m not going to pretend it had.
Monday Through Thursday, One Direction
SPY closed $763.47 Monday, $765.91 Tuesday, $766.08 Wednesday, $771.10 Thursday. QQQ did the same climb — $706.32, $710.72, $711.37, $721.11. Four days, four green closes, each one a little bigger than the last.
Thursday was the standout. That’s the day Jackson Hole opened, and both names put in their strongest single-day move of the stretch — SPY up roughly five dollars, QQQ up nearly ten. I don’t need to know what anyone said at a podium to draw that on a chart. Price moved. That’s the only vote that counts here.
What I do with four green closes in a row isn’t get excited. It’s mark the level where the move started and the level where it’s trading now, and wait to see whether price treats the old high as support on the way back down, or ignores it completely. That’s the whole job.
Friday: A High, Then a Give-Back
Friday had three scheduled events on the calendar — a speech from Fed Chairman Warsh, a payrolls benchmark revision, and the Chicago PMI print. I don’t have the actual numbers from any of those, and I’m not going to guess at what moved the tape. I only have the price.
SPY opened Friday at $771.76, pushed to a fresh high of $775.29 intraday, then gave almost all of it back to a low of $768.31. The last print I have is near $769.35 — not a confirmed settled close, just the last trade my feed shows me before the data stopped updating cleanly. I want to be honest about that distinction rather than write “closed at” and imply more certainty than I have.
QQQ moved the same way. Opened near $716.93, and the last print I have is near $716.43. Again — not a close I can stand behind as final, just the last number on the screen.
That kind of day — a new high made and then sold — isn’t unusual after four straight up days into a headline-heavy morning. It doesn’t tell me anything by itself. It’s one bar. What matters is where it sits against the line I drew off Thursday’s push, and I won’t know that with any confidence until the market opens again and trades through it.
What the Week Actually Drew
Strip away the news and what’s left is a chart that went up four days straight, accelerated on the day the calendar got loud, then touched a new high and pulled back on the day after. That’s the whole week in one sentence. Everything else is a story I could tell myself, and I’ve learned not to trust the stories.
My chart for both names right now has one horizontal line at Thursday’s close and one at Friday’s high. Nothing else. No prediction about what happens when trading reopens, because I don’t have one worth writing down. I’ll know more once price actually touches those lines and shows me what it does there.
This is a weekend note, written before Friday’s numbers fully settled. I’d rather tell you that plainly than round it off to sound more finished than it is. If you want to watch how these lines get tested when the week reopens, I run a free chat where I mark them out loud.
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