Three days of giving ground. That’s what got us here.
SPY closed Thursday last week at $776.34. Friday it closed $772.67, down 0.47%. Monday it closed $767.45, down another 0.68%. Two sessions, roughly $9 gone from the top. QQQ moved the same way, closing $729.87 Friday, then $717.51 Monday — down 1.69% in a single session. Combined with Friday’s smaller loss, that’s more than a point off the Nasdaq name in three trading days.
I don’t trade the reason. I trade where price stopped. And through Friday and Monday, price didn’t stop anywhere convincing. It just kept giving line after line back.
Today’s session, mechanically
SPY opened today at $770.36. High of the day: $772.47. Low: $768.11. It closed at $769.06, up 0.21% from Monday’s close. That’s a $4.36 range on the day — tight, and it closed near the middle of it, not pinned to either edge.
QQQ opened at $720.41, ran up to $721.50, dropped to $712.61, and closed at $716.08 — down 0.20% from Monday. Wider range than SPY relative to price, and it closed below its open, but well off the low.
The FOMC released its Meeting Minutes at 2:00pm ET today. I’m not going to tell you what they said, because that’s not what I trade and it’s not what this page is for. What I can tell you is what the chart did after 2:00pm: it didn’t extend Friday and Monday’s selling. Both names closed the session little-changed relative to where they opened, given the size of the moves the two prior days produced. That’s a contained session. Not a bounce, not a breakdown. Contained.
What three days of pullback actually looks like on a chart
This is the part traders skip past because it’s boring, and it’s the part that matters most. A pullback isn’t one red candle. It’s a sequence — each day closing lower than it opened, or lower than the day before, until the sequence either continues or it doesn’t. Friday closed lower. Monday closed lower, and closed hard. Today closed roughly flat to slightly up on SPY, slightly down on QQQ, but neither one made a new low past Monday’s close.
That’s the only fact in this. Not a call, not a lean. A three-day losing sequence that produced one session where the losing didn’t continue. I mark that on the chart and move on. I don’t predict what day four does from a spot like this. I wait for price to tell me.
What I’m watching tomorrow
Thursday brings two data points before the bell. The Philly Fed Manufacturing Index is due at 8:30am ET, forecast at 24.1 against a previous reading of 41.4 — a sharp expected drop, though it’s a forecast, not a result yet. Initial jobless claims post at the same time, forecast 210K against last week’s 209K, essentially flat.
I don’t have Thursday’s numbers. Nobody does, not yet. What I have is a line on the chart from where price stopped in this three-day sequence, and a plan for what happens if price comes back to test it after the data prints. That’s the whole job tomorrow morning — watch the reaction, not the headline.
Why I’m not calling a bottom or a top here
A contained session after two losing days isn’t a signal. It’s one data point. I’ve had contained sessions turn into day-four selloffs, and I’ve had them turn into the low of the move. The difference was never something I could read in the minutes or the forecast. It was always in what price did at the level, days after the news was old.
So I’m not naming a direction today. I’m marking where SPY held $768 on the low and where QQQ held $712 on the low, and I’m watching whether either level gets tested again once Thursday’s data is out and digested. If it holds a second time, that means something. If it doesn’t, that means something else. I won’t know which until it happens.
That’s the whole approach. No indicator told me any of this. The chart did.
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