SPY, QQQ Fall a Third Day — CPI Is Tomorrow’s Test
SPY closed at $757.89 today. That’s down from $762.40 yesterday, which was down from $765.96 the day before. Three closes, three lower closes. I don’t need a study to tell me that — I just need the last three candles on a daily chart, and they’re all red.
QQQ did the same thing, only harder. It closed at $708.69, down 1.06% from yesterday’s $716.31. SPY only gave up 0.59% today. Whatever’s pressuring this tape, it’s leaning on the Nasdaq side more than the S&P side. That’s the kind of detail that doesn’t show up in a headline but shows up on the chart every single time — the two indices moving at different speeds tells you where the selling is actually concentrated.
What today’s candle actually shows
SPY opened at $758.03 this morning, pushed up to $760.09, then spent the rest of the session working down to a low of $756.64 before settling at $757.89. Open near the low of the eventual range, a small poke higher that failed, then a slow bleed into the close. That’s not a panic candle. It’s a controlled one — the kind that tells you sellers had the day, not that they were desperate for it.
QQQ’s range told a similar story with more distance in it. Open at $707.55, high of $712.06, low of $706.85, close at $708.69. The high came early and got sold. By the afternoon, price was living in the bottom third of the day’s range. Again — not a collapse, just steady pressure that never let buyers hold the high.
I drew my lines off yesterday’s close on both charts before the open. SPY’s $762.40 level held as resistance basically all day — price never got back above it after the first hour. QQQ never even challenged its equivalent line. When a level holds cleanly like that, on no news of its own, I mark it and move on. I don’t need a reason. I need the line to keep working next time price comes back to it.
This is the part of the job that has nothing to do with being right about tomorrow. A line that holds today is a line I trust more tomorrow, whether the news is boring or loud. Today’s news was PPI. Tomorrow’s is CPI. The line doesn’t know the difference, and neither do I until price tells me.
The report nobody’s talking about
PPI came out this morning, alongside jobless claims, before the open. I watched both prints land and I watched the reaction in the candles — the sell pressure that showed up in SPY and QQQ today happened after that data hit the tape. I’m not going to tell you what the number was, because guessing at a figure I didn’t see with my own eyes is exactly the kind of thing that gets a trader in trouble. What I can tell you is that price moved, and the move was down, and it was sharper in QQQ than in SPY. That’s the only part of it that belongs on a price chart.
PPI matters because it’s supposed to be the appetizer. Tomorrow is the entrée, and the market knows it.
Tomorrow is the real event
Friday morning brings CPI at 8:30am ET — Core CPI expected at 0.2% month over month, 2.4% year over year. Headline CPI expected at 0.4% month over month, 3.4% year over year. An hour and a half later, at 10:00am, the preliminary University of Michigan consumer sentiment reading is due, forecast at 51.0.
I’m not going to sit here and tell you what the print will be or how price will react to it. Anyone who tells you that with confidence the night before is selling you something, and not the good kind. What I do know is that this CPI reading lands five days before the Fed meets on September 15th and 16th. That timing alone is why tomorrow’s candle will carry more weight than today’s, and today’s carried more weight than the one before it.
Three down days in a row have already put both SPY and QQQ into territory where the next line matters more than the last three did combined. From Sunday’s high close at $765.96, SPY is down roughly 1.06% over three sessions. That’s not a crash. It’s a slow leak, and slow leaks either stop at a level or they don’t.
How I’m marking it into the print
My job tonight isn’t to predict tomorrow’s number. It’s to mark where price has stopped before on both charts and know exactly what a clean break of those lines looks like versus what a fakeout looks like, in either direction. If SPY opens tomorrow and immediately reclaims today’s $760.09 high, that tells me something different than if it opens below today’s $756.64 low and stays there. The number itself won’t tell me anything until I see what price does with it.
That’s the whole discipline. Not guessing the outcome. Marking the levels where the outcome will show up first.
Three red closes in a row make tomorrow feel heavier than it might otherwise. That’s fine. Heaviness is a feeling, not a level. I’ll have my lines drawn before 8:30am, the same as I do every morning, and I’ll let the candle after the print do the talking instead of doing it for it.
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