Morning Market Notes 10-16-26

Market Calendar

$SPX & $QQQ

Calmer tape after Thursday's rip. SPY up 0.18% at 773.18 premarket, sitting between its 770 Put Wall and 775 Call Wall. QQQ off 0.16% at 726.81, holding above the 723 Put Wall. DIA and IWM green again, VIX down 3% to 15.97. SPX closed at 7744.06, and SPY's move puts it around 7758, back above the 7750 key, with the 7775 key overhead and 7800 above that.

Yesterday the Dow ripped over 500 points, up 1.08%, and the Russell tacked on 1.38% while the Nasdaq barely finished green. Money is still rotating out of chips and into everything else. Yields are cooling off the highs, the 10Y around 5.09% after tagging 5.36% last week, and Warsh didn't signal an October hike, so CME has about an 85% chance the Fed stays put on the 28th. AI credit is still the sore spot with CoreWeave's bonds sitting near 15%, and the regional banks report this morning.

It's monthly opex Friday, so a big chunk of open interest rolls off at the close. Expect 7750 to act like a magnet into the afternoon, then the tape can loosen once that gamma clips off. Import prices hit at 8:30, then industrial production and capacity utilization at 9:15.

Let's have a sesh.

He almost quit. Then $100K in prop payouts.

TigerWould put in two years on options and twelve months on futures with only a few green months to show for it, and he almost walked away. Then he put the same read you get in these notes every morning next to real-time flow and pulled $100K+ in prop payouts in 2025, $65K inside his first two months as a member, $15K in the first six days of 2026. His words: "Within weeks, I wasn't chasing the market, I was in the move." Nobody hands you his numbers, but you're already doing the reading, the only thing missing is the flow.