SPY and QQQ This Week: October 9, 2026 Recap and the CPI Week Ahead
It’s Saturday morning, nothing is moving, and this is the best hour of the week for me to read the charts.
Here is the week of October 5 to 9 in numbers. SPY closed Friday at 778.57 against 769.64 the prior Friday, a gain of 1.16%. QQQ closed at 751.27 against 749.58, a gain of 0.23%. If you only looked at the weekly change, you would call QQQ’s week flat and move on.
What a boring +0.23% week hides
Look at the range instead of the close. QQQ’s weekly high was 762.86 on Tuesday and its low was 743.23 on Thursday. That is a spread of roughly 19.6 points. SPY’s week ran from a low of 769.63 on Monday to a high of 781.62 on Tuesday, a spread of roughly 12.0 points. In percentage terms the Nasdaq-100 fund covered about 2.6% from high to low, and SPY covered about 1.5%.
Inside the QQQ week sits a Thursday that finished down 1.34%. That single day is larger than the whole week’s net change, more than five times over.
A flat weekly close says almost nothing about the ride.
How Friday looked
Friday gave back part of Thursday. SPY opened at 776.24, reached a high of 779.42, a low of 775.14, and closed at 778.57. That is up 4.64 points, or 0.60%, from the prior close of 773.93. It gapped up and the gap never filled. The close sat 2.33 above the open, about 80% of the way up the day’s range, and above Thursday’s high of 777.09. It was the second-highest close of the September 17 to October 9 stretch, behind Tuesday’s 779.09.
QQQ gapped up too, from a prior close of 747.58 to an open of 752.55, a gap of 4.97 that never filled. It opened close to the day’s high of 752.87, hit a low of 748.37, and closed at 751.27. That is up 3.69 points, or 0.49%, yet the close was 1.28 below the open, so the candle has a red body on a green day. It finished about 64% of the way up its range and still sits below Wednesday’s close of 757.73.
The week ahead, names and times only
I am making no call on what these releases will show. I am listing them so the schedule is not a surprise.
Monday, October 12 is Columbus Day, and the U.S. stock market is open. Large banks begin reporting earnings early in the week. Tuesday, October 13 brings NFIB Small Business Optimism at 6:00am ET and Existing Home Sales at 10:00am ET. Wednesday, October 14 has the September CPI report at 8:30am ET, which is the main scheduled release of the week. Thursday, October 15 stacks four releases at 8:30am ET: Unemployment Claims, PPI, Retail Sales, and the Philadelphia Fed Manufacturing Index.
I am leaving forecast numbers out, because the sources I checked disagreed.
Use the quiet weekend to decide sizing
Sizing decisions made while a position is moving against you are rarely good ones. Decisions made on a quiet weekend, with the schedule in front of you, are boring and clear.
Here is the exercise I run. I take a week like this one, where QQQ covered about 19.6 points between its high and low, and I ask what my position would have lost at the Thursday low if I had held it through. I do the math in dollars, because dollars are what hit the account. If that number would have rattled me, the position was too big, however good the idea looked.
Then I set the size for next week against that number. A week with a CPI morning on Wednesday and four releases at 8:30am on Thursday is a week where I expect the swings to be at least as wide as the one I just reviewed, without assuming a direction. Smaller size is a choice I can make now, for free.
Why a defined stop beats improvising
An alert-based trade comes with its decisions already made: an entry, a stop, and a target, all fixed before the position is open. Improvising is most tempting on a big-release morning, and “I’ll see how it feels” tends to turn into moving the stop, then removing it.
A defined stop turns the worst case into a known amount before you enter. If the trade is wrong, you take the loss you already agreed to. That is the entire value of the structure. It does not make trades win. It makes the losing ones cost what you planned.
Where copy-trading fits
This is the reason I use Alertsify. The alert gives me the trade with its levels attached, and I can copy it or skip it. Copying means I am not inventing a plan mid-session, and I can match my size to the numbers I worked out on Saturday.
One honest line, because it belongs here: copied trades can lose. A stop limits the damage on a single trade, but it does not remove losses, and a string of them is possible. Early on, my own results were rough. Year 1: lost $11,400. Year 2: broke even. Year 3-6: profitable. None of that is a promise of what your results will look like.
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