SPY, QQQ Pull Back Monday. FOMC Starts Tomorrow
SPY closed at $760.88 today. Friday’s close was $764.29. That’s a give-back of $3.41, about 0.45%. The open was $759.00, the low $757.93, the high $763.52. Price spent the session under Friday’s close and never got back above it. Final number, settled, market closed at 4pm ET.
QQQ closed at $709.18. Friday was $714.88. That’s $5.70 lower, about 0.80%. Open at $703.29, low $702.75, high $712.95. QQQ touched its high early and spent the rest of the day fading toward the low before a small bounce into the close.
Nearly double the damage in QQQ versus SPY. Same story as last week. When the tape turns down, the growth-heavy index gives back more than the broad index. When it turns up, it’s usually also the first one moving. That asymmetry isn’t a prediction. It’s just what the candles have been doing.
What today actually was
Friday closed green. Today opened lower and closed lower. A real pullback, not a rounding error. Nothing about the size of the move suggests panic — SPY held above $757 all session, QQQ held above $702. Both indices found a floor early and mostly traded a range beneath it for six and a half hours.
I don’t assign a reason to a red day. The tape doesn’t hand you a reason, it hands you a candle. Today’s candle: down open, held a range, small close-off-the-low bounce in QQQ, weaker close-off-the-low bounce in SPY. That’s the whole read.
What matters more than the percentage is where the range sat relative to levels already marked before today opened. A pullback that stays inside an existing range is a different animal than one that breaks below the last swing low. Today’s low in both names stayed above recent support. Worth writing down. Not worth reacting to.
Tomorrow is day one of two, not decision day
The Fed’s meeting runs two days — tomorrow, Tuesday September 15, and Wednesday September 16. The rate decision and the dot plot come out Wednesday at 2:00pm ET, followed by the press conference. Tomorrow itself produces no decision. It’s a closed-door meeting. Markets will trade tomorrow with the outcome still unknown, the same way they’d trade any other Tuesday, except everyone is aware the clock is running toward Wednesday afternoon.
Retail Sales data also lands Wednesday morning at 8:30am ET, ahead of the Fed statement. I’m not going to hand you a number for what it prints. I don’t have one, and made-up numbers don’t belong anywhere near a level you might trade off of.
I also won’t tell you what the Fed is going to do. Not a cut, not a hold, not a hike, not what the dots will show. Anyone printing that with confidence right now is guessing out loud. The chart doesn’t know the outcome either, and neither do I.
What the chart does let you do tonight
What the chart lets you do is mark where price has already reacted. Today’s low in SPY, $757.93. Today’s low in QQQ, $702.75. Today’s high in each, $763.52 and $712.95. Those four numbers are facts, already printed, not opinions about Wednesday.
If either index tests those lows again tomorrow before the Fed even sits down, that’s information — price is telling you something independent of any headline. If it holds well above them and grinds sideways into Wednesday, that’s a different kind of information. Either way, you’re reacting to price that already happened, not to a decision that hasn’t.
The mistake I used to make, back when my chart had fourteen things drawn on it, was trying to pre-position for a headline I couldn’t see. I’d guess the direction, draw a target around the guess, then get run over when the guess was half right and the size was wrong. A blank chart with a few honest lines doesn’t do that. It just tells you what the range has been and waits for price to say something at the edge of it.
Two days, one rule
Tomorrow is the setup day, not the event. Wednesday is the event — decision at 2pm, presser after, Retail Sales as an appetizer at 8:30am. Between now and then, the job is the same job it always is: mark the levels that already printed, and let Wednesday afternoon be Wednesday afternoon’s problem.
Today’s pullback wasn’t a warning sign. It was a give-back after a green Friday, with QQQ losing more than SPY like it usually does. Nothing in that candle needs a Fed decision to explain it, and nothing about tomorrow needs one either. The lines get drawn tonight regardless of what Wednesday brings.
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