SPY and QQQ Today: October 15, 2026 Recap and the Night Before Monthly Expiration
Jake here. Thursday’s numbers are settled, so I start there, then move to Friday, when monthly options expire and holders have a decision to make.
Thursday’s close, by the numbers
SPY opened at 766.25, traced a range from 764.43 to 772.87, and closed at 771.79. Wednesday’s close was 769.60, so the change was +2.19, or +0.28%. The open was 3.35 below the prior close, about 0.44%, and the day finished 5.54 above the open, roughly 87% of the way up a 8.44 range.
QQQ had the wider swing. It opened at 718.55 against a prior close of 728.95, a gap down of 10.40, which puts the open about 1.43% below the previous close. The range ran from 715.44 to 729.43. QQQ closed at 728.00, which is 9.45 above the open and about 90% of the way up a 13.99 range, near the high of the day. The final change was -0.95, or -0.13%. In other words, QQQ opened down about 1.43% and finished down only 0.13%, recovering most of the opening drop. The gap was never filled.
I am not going to tell you why any of that happened, because I do not know, and neither does anyone else who is being straight with you. What I will say is that the open was not the day.
The 8:30am cluster
Thursday morning at 8:30am ET brought a stack of scheduled releases. PPI had a forecast of 0.6% month over month against a previous 0.4%, Core PPI a forecast of 0.3% against 0.2%, Retail Sales a forecast of 0.3% against 1.2%, Core Retail Sales a forecast of 0.6% against 1.4%, Unemployment Claims a forecast of 199K against 197K, and the Philadelphia Fed Manufacturing Index a forecast of 28.2 against 37.8.
Those are the forecasts and previous readings, nothing more. I did not pull the released figures for this recap, so I make no claim about what they said or whether they drove the move. A busy calendar and a big opening gap sitting on the same day does not prove one caused the other.
Friday is monthly expiration
Friday, October 16, is the third Friday of the month, which means standard monthly options expire. For anyone holding a contract, the first decision is the plainest one. Do you carry it into the final session, or do you close it before then. Both are legitimate. What is not legitimate is drifting into the answer because you forgot to decide.
The second item is time decay. On expiration day a near-the-money option loses what is left of its time value quickly, so a contract that looks cheap is cheap for a reason. Your underlying has to move enough, and soon enough, to cover that cost.
The third item is where the contract sits against the price. An option that finishes in the money can be exercised or assigned, and a short position can leave you with shares you did not plan to hold. Know before the open which of your contracts are close to the money, and what each one turns into at 4:00pm.
The fourth item is that flat into expiration is a position. Closing early and watching from the side costs you nothing except the chance of being right, and you can decide that trade-off on purpose.
An illustrative hypothetical
This is a made-up example with round numbers, not market data. Say you hold a call you paid $2.00 for, which is $200 per contract, and on Friday morning it is quoted at $0.80 with the underlying close to your strike. You can sell for $80 now, or hold and accept that the remaining $80 can go to zero by the close. Neither answer is wrong, but the plan has to exist before the open, not after the quote starts moving.
What a pre-set plan looks like
Write down the maximum loss in dollars before you enter, and size the position so that number is one you can take without flinching. Decide the time you will close by, not only the price. Improvising on expiration day is how a defined risk turns into an undefined one.
Where copy trading fits
This is the reason I built my routine around alerts. A concrete alert arrives with an entry and a defined stop already attached, so the hard thinking happens before the pressure does. I started out improvising. Year 1: lost $11,400. Year 2: broke even. Year 3-6: profitable. The difference was not a better read on the news, it was having the plan written down first.
One honest line: copied trades can lose, stops can slip in fast markets, and nothing here is a promise of results. If you want to see how the alerts are structured, there is a free trial, and you can judge the format without risking a dollar.
Correction, October 16, 2026: the daily data feed revised a few prices after this recap first ran. SPY’s low is 764.43 (was 764.44), and QQQ’s open is 718.55 and low is 715.44 (were 718.54 and 715.43). The figures above use the revised values.
Curious how mirroring works on a real account? The 7-day free trial connects your account so you can check the fills yourself.
Disclosure: that’s an affiliate link — I may earn a commission if you sign up for a paid plan, at no extra cost to you. There’s a free trial if you want to look around first.
Related reading