SPY and QQQ Price Action: October 9, 2026 Weekly Recap and the CPI Week Ahead
This recap reads the chart and nothing else. Every number below comes from the daily and weekly bars for SPY and QQQ, settled Friday, October 9, 2026. Where a level matters, it is a price that already printed. Nothing here is a forecast.
Friday’s SPY bar: a gap that held
SPY opened at 776.24 against a Thursday close of 773.93, a gap up of 2.31. It traded between 775.14 and 779.42 and closed at 778.57, up 4.64 or 0.60% on the day.
The detail worth marking is the low. At 775.14, it stayed above Thursday’s close, so the gap never filled. The open itself sat inside Thursday’s range of 770.44 to 777.09, which means the gap started within yesterday’s territory. The close, though, finished above Thursday’s high of 777.09. That is a close outside the prior day’s range, beyond a gap that merely survived.
The candle itself: the range was 4.28, the close sat 2.33 above the open, and the close landed about 80% of the way up the range. A body that large relative to the range, with the close near the top, is a clean green bar. Over the stretch from September 17 through October 9, this is the second-highest close, behind only Tuesday’s 779.09.
Friday’s QQQ bar: a red body on a green day
QQQ tells a different story with the same net result. It opened at 752.55 against a prior close of 747.58, a gap of 4.97, and the low of 748.37 stayed above Thursday’s close. Like SPY, the gap never filled.
The shape is where the two diverge. QQQ opened within 0.32 of its high of 752.87, then closed at 751.27, which is 1.28 below the open. That is a red body on a day the index finished up 3.69, or 0.49%. The close sat roughly 64% of the way up a 4.50 range.
The close of 751.27 is back above last Friday’s close of 749.58, above Monday’s low of 749.08, and above Thursday’s close. It remains 5.91 below Thursday’s high of 757.18 and below Wednesday’s close of 757.73.
The week: SPY and QQQ went different directions
SPY closed the week at 778.57 against 769.64 the prior Friday, a gain of 8.93 or 1.16%. QQQ closed at 751.27 against 749.58, a gain of 1.69 or 0.23%. Both finished green, but the gap between those two numbers is the story of the week.
SPY’s weekly low was 769.63 on Monday, essentially at the prior Friday’s close. Its weekly high was 781.62 on Tuesday. That is a weekly range of roughly 11.99, and the Friday close of 778.57 finished 3.05 below the weekly high, in the upper part of the range.
QQQ’s weekly high was 762.86 on Tuesday and its weekly low was 743.23 on Thursday, a range of about 19.63. The Friday close sat 11.59 below the weekly high and 8.04 above the weekly low, which puts it a bit under the middle of the week’s range.
SPY closed near the top of a narrower range and QQQ closed in the middle of a much wider one. The bars show it, and the divergence can be drawn and watched.
Reference levels to mark for the week ahead
Levels are drawn from prices that already traded, so they require no opinion. For SPY, the weekly high of 781.62 and the weekly low of 769.63 frame the week. Tuesday’s close of 779.09 sits just above Friday’s close and is worth a line, as is Thursday’s high of 777.09, which Friday’s close cleared.
For QQQ, the weekly high of 762.86 and the weekly low of 743.23 are the outer boundaries. Thursday’s low of 743.23 is the one to mark most clearly, since it is both the weekly low and the bottom of a bar that Friday’s gap left well behind. Wednesday’s close of 757.73 and Thursday’s high of 757.18 sit overhead as the nearest levels that Friday did not reach.
What to watch: the calendar for October 12 to 16
Here is the schedule, with names and times only, in Eastern Time.
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 has NFIB Small Business Optimism at 6:00am and Existing Home Sales at 10:00am.
Wednesday, October 14 has the September CPI report at 8:30am, the main scheduled release of the week. Thursday, October 15 has Unemployment Claims, PPI, Retail Sales, and the Philadelphia Fed Manufacturing Index, all at 8:30am.
Treating CPI as a single-bar event
A scheduled release at 8:30am lands before the regular session opens, and a single bar can carry the whole reaction. A price-action trader has a simple option: wait for the bar to close. One closed bar shows where price settled relative to the levels already drawn, and that is information a half-formed bar cannot give.
In practice, that means looking at the closed bar against the lines above. The observation is whether it closed beyond the weekly high or low, inside the range, or back at a level marked from this week. Those are observations about structure, made after the fact, with a risk number set before any order goes in.
Waiting does not guarantee a better outcome, and it will sometimes mean missing part of a move. It trades speed for clarity, and a trader should decide in advance whether that trade-off suits their plan. Position size and stop placement still belong to the trader, and nothing in this recap is a recommendation to buy or sell.
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