Morning Market Notes 09-16-26

Market Calendar

$SPX & $QQQ

Fed day. SPY is up 0.27% premarket at 759.43, sitting right under the 760 Call Wall. QQQ up 0.47% at 707.85, DIA up 0.17%, IWM up 0.15%, VIX 16.89 and off 1.8%. Tuesday closed SPX at 7585, second straight red day and 15 points under the 7600 level that held Monday. Retail Sales just printed hot at 8:30, up 1.2% against 0.8% expected, ex-autos up 1.4%, gas stations up 3.1% because that's where $100 oil shows up. Futures barely moved on it. Nobody is putting on size before 2pm.

Today's retail print gives Warsh all the cover he needs. A 25bp hike to 3.75-4.00 is 92% priced per CME, the first since 2023. What actually moves the tape at 2pm is the dot plot and the tone: October is sitting at 41% odds for another hike and December at 27%, and that's where the vol lives. Crypto got smoked overnight too, Bitcoin down 4% to 75K after the Clarity Act cloture vote failed in the Senate, one more thing not helping risk appetite.

Walls stepped down overnight to 7600/7500 from 7700/7600, so the market repriced its range lower, and the implied move is 1.07%, about 81 points. 7600 is the Call Wall and the key level, and we closed under it, so the first job this morning is a reclaim. The plan: reclaim and hold 7600 and the morning rotation is 7600 to 7650. Reject at 7600 and 7550 is the first stop. Either way the morning session is a range trade, then step aside into 2pm. The real move comes on the dots and the Warsh presser at 2:30, that's when the range expands and the walls get tested.

Tech has been the better index for two sessions, so a hold above 705 and a push into 710 is the tell that risk is leaning long into the Fed. Macro: Retail Sales and Import Prices at 8:30 are in, Business Inventories and NAHB at 10, rate decision and projections at 2, Warsh at 2:30. Quarterly opex is 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.