SPY, QQQ Rally Monday: Marking Today’s Range
I closed the chart Friday with SPY sitting at $761.69. I opened it this morning and it had already gapped to $766.25. By the final print, $773.50. Up $11.81 on the day. +1.55%.
QQQ did more. Friday’s close was $721.45. This morning’s open was $727.89. The close was $741.47. Up $20.02. +2.77%. Almost double SPY’s move, in percentage terms, on the same day.
Those are settled numbers. The bell rang, the tape stopped, and that’s what’s on it. I’m not marking anything off an intraday print that could still move. Today is done. Locked in.
What the range actually looked like
SPY’s low was $766.03, set right near the open. The high was $774.89, set late. A $8.86 range on the day, and the close at $773.50 sat less than a point and a half off that high. Almost the entire range was used to travel in one direction, and the close barely gave any of it back.
QQQ’s range was wider. Low $727.81, high $743.22. That’s a $15.41 spread — one of the widest single-day ranges I’ve marked in weeks. And like SPY, the close at $741.47 landed within two dollars of the top of that range. Barely any pullback into the close on either name.
A wide range where price closes pinned near the high tells me something specific: whoever was buying today kept buying into the last hour instead of taking profit. That’s a fact about the tape, not a prediction about tomorrow.
I don’t know why, and I’m not going to pretend I do
I watched the chart move. I did not watch the newswire. I could open five tabs right now and find five different explanations for why QQQ ran harder than SPY today, and by tomorrow half of them would be walked back or forgotten. That’s not the job.
The job is the two lines I’m about to draw, not the paragraph I’d have to write to justify them. Price told me exactly where it stopped today. It didn’t tell me why, and I stopped asking it that question a long time ago. The indicators used to ask why for me. That’s part of what I deleted them for.
Where I’m drawing lines off today
On SPY, today’s high at $774.89 becomes a level. Not a target — a level. If price comes back up to it in the next few sessions, I want to see what it does there: push through cleanly, or stall and reject. Today’s low at $766.03 is the second line. That’s roughly where the gap up started, and gaps get revisited more often than people expect.
On QQQ, the same exercise. $743.22 marked at the top. $727.81 marked at the bottom, close to where the open sat. A $15 range like this one usually gets partially retraced before it gets extended — I’ve watched that pattern enough times to respect it, even though I’m not betting on it happening again this time.
What I’m explicitly not doing is assuming today continues into tomorrow. A strong close on a wide range is a fact about today. It is not a promise about Tuesday. I’ve been burned marking a continuation line off a big green day and watching price open flat and chop sideways for three sessions instead. The line stays on the chart either way. I just wait to see if price agrees with it.
Tuesday is a lighter day
Tomorrow’s calendar doesn’t carry the weight today’s tape suggests it should. Richmond Fed Manufacturing comes out at 10:00am ET — forecast is 2, previous was 4. ADP Weekly Employment Change prints with no forecast given and a previous read of 16.3K. There are a few Fed speakers on the schedule during the day, but I’m not going to guess at what any of them says before they say it. Scheduling a speech is not the same as scheduling news.
Compared to a day like today, that’s a quiet docket. Which is exactly when a market that just had a big green day tends to either drift on the fumes of it or go dead sideways while everyone waits for the next real catalyst. Both are normal. Neither requires me to predict which one happens.
What I’m actually doing with this
Four lines on the chart tonight. Two on SPY, two on QQQ, all four taken straight off today’s settled range. No target price. No call for tomorrow. I wait for price to come back to one of them, and then I watch what it does when it gets there. That’s the whole method. It was true before today’s rally and it’ll be true after whatever Tuesday turns into.
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