SPY, QQQ Slide Again: PPI Sets Up Friday’s CPI
SPY closed today at $762.40. That’s down from $765.96 yesterday, which was itself down from $770.19 the day before. Two red closes in a row. Not a crash, not a signal, just the tape doing what it did.
The range today was tight. High of $764.47, low of $760.94, open at $764.08. Price opened near the high and spent the session grinding lower into the close. No violent move. No single headline candle. Just steady selling that didn’t let up until the bell.
QQQ told a slightly different story. It closed at $716.31, down from $718.36 yesterday. That’s a smaller drop in percentage terms than SPY took, and it comes after QQQ was basically flat the day before that — down less than a tenth of a percent from $718.96. Two days of SPY bleeding harder than QQQ. Tech held up. Whether that’s rotation or just noise, I don’t know yet, and I’m not going to pretend I do.
What two down days actually means
It means two down days. I know that sounds like nothing, but it’s worth saying plainly because the instinct after a second red close is to start building a story — momentum shift, distribution, smart money leaving. Maybe. Or maybe it’s two days out of a few hundred this year and the story gets written by whoever needs a headline.
My job isn’t to write that headline. My job is to mark where price stopped before and see if it stops there again. SPY’s low today sat at $760.94. That’s a level now. Not a prediction of where price goes next — a fact about where sellers and buyers fought last and buyers won, for now. I’ll watch what happens the next time price gets there.
Same with QQQ’s low of $714.02. Marked. Filed away. I don’t trade the mark itself, I trade what price does when it revisits it.
Tomorrow is the appetizer, not the meal
Tomorrow morning brings PPI. Core PPI is forecast at 0.3% month over month, up from last month’s 0.2%. Headline PPI is forecast at 0.4%, up from 0.0% previously. Jobless claims are expected around 205K versus 206K last week. All three print at 8:30am ET.
I want to be clear about what those numbers are: forecasts. Estimates that economists published ahead of time. Nobody knows what the actual print will say tomorrow, including me. Anyone telling you they know is guessing with confidence, which is worse than not guessing at all.
What I do know is that PPI tomorrow isn’t the week’s real event. That’s Friday, when CPI comes out. PPI is the appetizer — it can move price for an hour or a session, and sometimes it doesn’t move price at all — but CPI is what the market has actually been positioning around. I’m not going to detail Friday here because it hasn’t happened yet and detailing an event two days out just fills space with forecasting I don’t want to do.
What I’m doing with this
Nothing dramatic. Two down days doesn’t change how I mark a chart. I’ve got SPY’s $760.94 low and QQQ’s $714.02 low sitting as reference points. Tomorrow’s PPI might test those levels, might not touch them at all. If price gets there and holds, that’s information. If it blows through, that’s different information. Either way I find out by watching, not by guessing beforehand.
The chart doesn’t care what PPI comes in at. It only cares where price actually trades. That’s the whole discipline — wait for the mark to get tested, then react to what actually happens instead of what you expected to happen.
Blank chart. A few lines. That’s still all I need going into a week that has two data prints back to back.
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