SPY and QQQ today pulled back off Monday’s close, and neither move was large enough to call anything by itself. SPY closed at $770.56, down 0.32% from Monday’s $773.03. QQQ closed at $718.45, down 0.34% from Monday’s $720.87. Two tickers, two declines within a hundredth of a percent of each other — that kind of matching move across the broad index and the tech-heavy one usually means the market moved as one thing today, not because of anything specific to either.
What SPY and QQQ today actually printed
SPY opened at $774.53, almost dead on Monday’s close, then pushed to a session high of $774.61 in the first stretch of trading — a marginal new high, barely above the open. From there it went the other way. The session low landed at $769.20, and the close came in at $770.56, well off the low but also well off the high. A close sitting closer to the middle of its own range than to either edge. QQQ ran the same shape at larger scale. Open at $723.29, high at $723.35 — again, a high made almost immediately after the open and never revisited — then a slide to $715.50 for the low, with a close at $718.45. QQQ’s range today, top to bottom, was just under $8. The close sat roughly a third of the way up from the low. Not a strong close. Not a collapse either.
Reading a pullback off the highs
Both tickers opened near their eventual high and spent the rest of the day drifting lower into the close. That’s a different shape than a day that gets sold hard right out of the gate, and it’s also different from a day that grinds higher all session. It’s a slow bleed off an early high, with no real attempt to reclaim it once it was gone. I don’t read that as a trend change on one day’s evidence. A single session giving back roughly a third of a percent, after closing at $773.03 and $720.87 the day before, is inside the range of normal daily movement for both tickers. What I’m marking is where the day’s high and low sit, because those become the lines I’m watching tomorrow regardless of what tomorrow’s news does.
The lines this session leaves behind
SPY leaves today’s high at $774.61 and today’s low at $769.20. QQQ leaves its high at $723.35 and its low at $715.50. Those four numbers are the whole plan heading into tomorrow. If price opens tomorrow and stays under today’s highs, that’s sellers still in control of the level. If price works back above either high and holds there through the session, today reads as a pause inside an uptrend rather than the start of something else. I don’t have a preference for which one happens. The lines don’t care what I want. They only care what price does when it gets there.
Tomorrow’s CPI is the real catalyst, and I’m not guessing at it
Tomorrow morning at 8:30 AM ET, the CPI report comes out. The forecast for headline CPI month-over-month is 0.1%, against last month’s -0.4%. Core CPI month-over-month is forecast at 0.2%, against last month’s flat 0.0%. Year-over-year, headline CPI is forecast at 3.4%, down from 3.5% last month, and core CPI year-over-year is forecast at 2.5%, down from 2.6%. That’s what’s expected. I don’t know what the number actually comes in at — nobody does yet, because today is the 11th and the report doesn’t print until tomorrow morning. I’m not going to sit here and pretend I have a read on inflation data that hasn’t been released. What I have is a forecast, a prior month for comparison, and a chart with four lines already drawn on it from today’s session.
Why I mark levels now instead of predicting the print
The temptation the night before a CPI release is to build a story: inflation is cooling, so the market should do this, or the forecast is soft enough that a beat surprises everyone, so the market should do that. I’ve watched that kind of thinking cost people more than the print itself ever did. A forecast tells you what’s expected. It doesn’t tell you how price will actually move once the number crosses the wire, because the market’s reaction depends on more than just the headline figure — it depends on where price already was standing when the number hit. That’s why today’s session matters more than tomorrow’s forecast. SPY closing at $770.56, inside today’s range, tells me where the market was leaning going into the report. If tomorrow’s CPI comes in close to forecast and price barely reacts, that’s useful information about how much of this was already priced in. If it comes in materially different from forecast and price blows through today’s high or low immediately, that’s useful too. Either way, I find out by watching the lines react, not by deciding in advance what the number means.
What I’m actually doing between now and 8:30 AM
Nothing dramatic. The four levels from today’s session are marked. I’m not adding a position based on a guess about where core CPI lands, and I’m not sizing up because the forecast looks favorable on paper. A forecast is a number economists agree on in advance. It is not a trade. Tomorrow’s session will either confirm today’s pullback as sellers defending a level, or it’ll erase it inside the first hour once the CPI print hits. I don’t need to know which before it happens. I need to know what SPY and QQQ do at $774.61, $769.20, $723.35, and $715.50 once the number’s out, and that’s the only plan worth having tonight.
I mark levels like today’s and wait for the number instead of guessing at it, live in Static, the free daily chart room run by Draw Lines Make Money. If watching price react to CPI instead of predicting it sounds like your kind of process, you’re welcome to sit in tomorrow morning:
Join the free Static chart room →
Disclosure: that’s an affiliate link — I may earn a commission if you join a paid tier later, at no extra cost to you. The free room is free.