Morning Market Notes 09-18-26
Market Calendar
$SPX & $QQQ
Quarterly opex. Triple witching, the biggest expiration of the quarter, and the tape comes in flat after the best day since early August. SPY is off 0.27% premarket at 760.57, sitting right on the 760 Put Wall. QQQ up 0.17% at 718.16, DIA down 0.47%, IWM down 0.29%, VIX 15.52 and barely moving. Thursday closed SPX at 7637, up 1.1%, with semis up close to 3% and Mag7 names leading the whole way.
Why Thursday worked: yields stopped pressing 5% and stabilized, oil is down a third straight day and sitting right around $100 on easing Saudi supply worries, and the bond market decided a Warsh Fed that hikes into a soft economy is a Fed that gets inflation.
SPX 7650, 7600, a 50-point box on quarterly opex with the close at 7637, 13 points under the wall. That's a pin setup. Expect the first hour to probe both 7650 and 7600, then the afternoon to go dead as the quarterly open interest rolls off. Above 7650 the next stops are 7675 and 7700. Below 7600 there's air to 7563. Once the gamma clips off at the close the tape loosens up, so Monday's open is where the real move shows up, not this afternoon. Don't force size into a pin.
QQQ is the leader again, 718 premarket, above the 716 key and under the 720 Call Wall, with the 718 gap sitting right where it's trading. Hold 715 and tech grinds into the wall. Lose 715 and 710 is the Put Wall and the last line. Macro is light: Industrial Production and Capacity Utilization at 9:15, Leading Indicators at 10. Nothing on the calendar moves the tape today, opex does that.
Happy retirement, Warren.
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.