SPY & QQQ Today: Pullback After the Rally (Sep 23)
I don’t have fourteen indicators anymore. I have three days of closes and a question I ask every night before I shut the laptop: where did price actually go, not where do I think it’s going next.
This week gave me three clean days to ask that question. Monday, Tuesday, today. I’ll walk through what settled, in order, with nothing added.
Monday: the rally
SPY closed Monday at $773.50. QQQ closed at $741.47. Both names moved up hard that session. I’m not going to describe the move as anything more than what it was — a big up day, the kind that gets marked on a chart and then mostly ignored the next morning, because one green day tells you where price has been, not where it’s staying.
I drew my line at the close. That’s the whole ritual. No prediction attached to it.
Tuesday: the hold
Tuesday is where the two names started to separate a little, and it’s worth sitting with the settled numbers rather than rounding them into a single story.
SPY opened at $774.03, ran up to a high of $775.14, dipped to a low of $772.57, and closed at $773.38. Final settled print. That’s basically flat against Monday’s close — down two hundredths of a percent. SPY spent the day proving it could hold Monday’s gain without adding much to it. Not a rejection. Not a breakout continuation either. A pause, at the close.
QQQ told a slightly different story. Open at $740.98, high of $748.35, low of $740.93, close of $747.46. That’s a settled gain of 0.81% over Monday — QQQ didn’t just hold the rally, it pushed further into it. The high of the day came well above where it opened, and the close sat near that high rather than fading back toward the low. Tech-heavy names carried Tuesday.
Two lines on two charts, same week, doing different jobs. I marked both closes and left it there.
Today: the pullback
Here’s where I stop trying to be clever and just report what the tape did.
SPY opened today at $772.79, made a high of $773.02 early, then spent the session working lower. The low printed at $766.50 — well under Tuesday’s low of $772.57, which means today’s session took out a level that had held for two straight days. Final settled close: $767.83, down 0.72% from Tuesday.
QQQ moved the same direction. Open at $746.99, a tight high of $747.12 right out of the gate, then a slide to a low of $738.19 — again, a clean break below Tuesday’s $740.93 low. QQQ settled the day at $741.21, down 0.84%.
Both names opened near Tuesday’s close, tried to hold, and gave it up as the session went on. Both undercut their prior-day lows before the close. That’s the mechanical fact of today, and it’s the only fact I’m going to hand you.
What I’m not going to tell you
I don’t know why today pulled back. I wasn’t in the room where that got decided, and neither was anyone posting a confident explanation online this afternoon. Anyone telling you the specific reason SPY undercut $772.57 today is guessing, dressed up as insight. I’ve been burned by trusting a narrative more than a line. I don’t do it anymore.
What I have instead is a level. SPY’s Tuesday low, $772.57, just got taken out — that line now sits above price as something to watch on any bounce attempt, not below it as support. QQQ’s $740.93 did the same job. Those numbers don’t predict tomorrow. They just tell me where the last two sessions said “no further” before today said otherwise.
What’s next
Tomorrow brings two data points before the bell moves much: Unemployment Claims at 8:30am ET, with the forecast sitting at 201K against last week’s 196K, and New Home Sales at 10:00am ET, forecast 615K versus a prior 607K. A handful of Fed officials are scheduled to speak through the day — Williams, Barkin, Hammack, Paulson. I’m not going to guess what any of them say. I’ve never once profited from guessing a speech in advance, and I’m not starting today.
What I’ll do instead is the same thing I did after Monday’s rally and after today’s pullback: wait for the print, mark where it settles, and see if price comes back to touch a line I already drew. That’s the whole method. It was slow before it worked, and most days it still looks like nothing is happening.
If you want to watch how I mark these levels in real time — no signals, no “buy here” calls, just lines and the reasoning behind them — I run a free room where I post the charts as I draw them.
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