SPY, QQQ Snap Three-Day Slide on CPI Day
Three days in a row, SPY closed lower. Three days in a row, QQQ closed lower with it. Sep 8 to Sep 10, the tape just kept giving a little back — nothing violent, just a slow leak. $765.96 down to $757.83 on SPY. $718.36 down to $708.69 on QQQ. Small red candle, small red candle, small red candle.
Today broke that. CPI came out at 8:30 this morning. I’m not going to tell you the number, because the number isn’t the point of this post and I don’t trust myself to repeat it from memory anyway. What I can tell you is what price did after it printed, because that’s the only part of the morning I actually trade.
SPY opened at $764.72, pushed to a high of $766.38, dipped to $763.60, and closed at $764.29. Up 0.85% from yesterday’s close. QQQ opened $715.68, topped out at $717.63, held above $713.63 on the low side, and closed at $714.88 — up 0.87%. Both names finished within a point and a half of their session highs. That’s the detail that matters more than the percentage.
Closing near the high says something a green candle alone doesn’t
A green day after three red ones isn’t automatically a reversal. It’s just a green day. What tells me something is where the close landed relative to the range. SPY’s high was $766.38. It closed at $764.29 — about two dollars off the top, on a range that only spanned three dollars total. QQQ did the same thing, closing $2.75 off its high on a range of about four dollars.
Sellers had the whole session to push this back down and take the close. They didn’t. Buyers held the top third of the range into 4pm. I don’t need a story about why to mark that. I just need to see it, and it’s sitting right there on both charts.
I’m not calling this a trend change. Three losing days getting erased by one strong one isn’t proof of anything by itself. It’s one data point. I’m marking it as a level — today’s high, today’s close, today’s low — and I’ll let the next few sessions tell me whether anyone defends it.
What I actually did with this today
Nothing complicated. I had a line drawn near $758 on SPY from where price had reacted before — that’s roughly where Tuesday’s close landed, which is exactly why I had a line there in the first place. Price came down into that zone this week, and I watched to see if it would hold or fail. It held, and today it moved away from it with conviction. That’s the whole trade idea. Not a prediction about CPI, not a guess about the print. Just: here’s a line, here’s what happened when price got there.
QQQ gave me a similar shape a little lower, near $709, where Wednesday’s close sat. Same logic. I don’t need to know what the Fed thinks, what the CPI report said word for word, or what any strategist wrote about it this morning. I need to know where price stopped before, and whether it stops there again.
Next week is the real test, not today
Today was a reaction to a report that’s already in the past. Next week is different. The FOMC meets Tuesday and Wednesday, September 15 and 16, with the rate decision landing Wednesday afternoon. That’s five trading sessions from now, and it’s the next moment where the tape can move on something bigger than a single data print.
I’m not going to guess what gets decided. I don’t know, and pretending I do would be the exact habit I spent years unlearning — the one where I thought understanding the news gave me an edge. It didn’t. What gives me an edge is knowing where price has already respected a level, so that when Wednesday afternoon happens, I’m not staring at a blank chart trying to decide what to think in real time.
Between now and then, my only job is to mark the range this rebound built. Today’s high on SPY, today’s high on QQQ, the lows that held during the three-day slide, and the zones just above and below the current close. If price pushes into one of those lines next week and something changes — hesitation, a rejection, a fast move through — I’ll see it happen. I won’t need to have called the Fed decision correctly to act on it.
The part that took the longest to learn
For a long time I thought the work was reading the calendar right. Knowing what CPI would print, knowing what the Fed would do, having a view before the market had one. I was wrong about that more often than I was right, and every time I was wrong I’d already put size on the guess.
Now the work is smaller and slower. Watch the reaction. Mark where it stopped. Wait for it to come back. Today gave me one more line to add to a chart that already had a few. Next week will either confirm it or erase it, and either answer is fine — because I never needed to be right about the news to begin with. I only needed to be right about the line.
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