Morning Market Notes 09-14-26
Market Calendar
$SPX & $QQQ
Friday's bounce lasted one session. QQQ is off 1.78% premarket and already trading under the 710 key with the 700 Put Wall in sight. SPY down 0.81% and back below its 760 Put Wall, DIA off 0.55%, IWM off 0.67%. VIX bid 13% to 17.9. Protection is getting paid for before the cash open and it's a Fed week.
Two drivers this morning. Oil is the first one: Brent up another 3% pushing $107 after the Houthis hit Saudi targets over the weekend and Riyadh shut its East-West pipeline, the one route that was getting crude around Hormuz. The second is the AI trade getting hit from the inside. Dario Amodei published an essay calling for the labs to slow down frontier model development, Altman and Musk backed him, and semis are getting sold globally. NVDA, AMD, MRVL, and LRCX are all red premarket while the money rotates into names like CRWD, PANW, and NOW that are seen as less exposed to a slowdown. Friday's warm core CPI has an 85% hike priced for Wednesday, so the bond market isn't helping either.
SPX walls stepped back up to 7700/7600 after Friday's green close, and now the premarket wants to open right on the 7600 Put Wall with the 7636 gap fill overhead. That's the setup: dealers get short gamma below the wall, so a break of 7600 that holds opens the door to 7550, and a reclaim is the squeeze back toward the gap. We'll see if the sellers who owned last week are back at the open or if this is another Monday gap that gets faded.
Macro day is empty. The week is all about the Fed: decision and presser Wednesday, the first hike in three years if it lands, then quarterly opex Friday.
Let's have a sesh.
From cutting winners short to building a house.
jmtiffany was unprofitable, stuck in the rat race, and cutting every winner short the second it wicked against him. Then he put the same levels you just read next to real-time flow, and almost a year in, his prop payouts fund his personal accounts and the profits are building his house. Not everyone's year looks like that, but the fix was the same one every time: the flow told him the move was still on, so he stopped bailing early. You already have the levels. The flow is what lets you hold the winner.