what i'm looking at this week 2025.09.21

🌟 Welcome!

This week's analysis is me trying to make sense of a market with puzzle pieces scattered everywhere. In my experience, there's always a story to be told – sometimes it just takes a little longer to find when, on the surface, it seems like you just don't understand why they're going crazy. So we have a slightly longer newsletter today as I work through this.

At the highs, you don't have hindsight to guide you, but we do have tools we can use to measure where we may be going, and other charts and plain old years of staring at the tape to help us intuit things.

Wednesday's FOMC was a dump in the morning before the news. At news time, they recovered by the time the interest rate decision was made, but they could not push it much further. This didn't signal confidence. On the way down earlier, they seemed to try to take it lower but failed in a shakeout operation – tested, recovered, almost failed again but found the level they didn't want to fall away from.

But on Thursday, they gapped over the rough spot they couldn't take on Wednesday. Was this a delayed reaction to the news? Or the market's only way to reach new all time highs after the Fed meeting? I'd feel more confident if we got there during regular session instead of via gap up.

As it stands, all I see is a gap to fill below. Doesn't have to happen tomorrow, or even next week, but this gap likely isn't staying on the table for long. We reached ATH Tuesday, immediately dumped from there, but did make regular session ATH again later in the week – but only via gap up. Feels suspicious.

📸 The Big Picture

The measured move from Thursday's rally is complete no matter how you slice it. I have double confirmation on that one. From our current close we could begin to head down, or perhaps continue up to 25000 (our next measured move zone).

We closed inside Friday's spike. If we break out and hold above Friday's spike, we're looking at more bullish behavior, at least short term. If we retest and lose the spike base, we've got our numbers below.

Last week also left us with more than one poor low – these are ripe for cleaning.

If she starts falling, I'm looking for visits to these neighborhoods: 24730, 24695.5. If she can't recover from that lower number, she's headed to the gap, potentially to fill at 24549. Quick rip through there means 24345.25, with a potential stop at 50% between POC and PWVAL (24438.25) or thereabouts. If we make it all the way to the bottom, 24345.25, during regular session, that's a place I'm buying with many hands – marked it in green on the chart. it’s worth a scalp at least.

One last observation – seems like many are looking at SPY 666 for resistance. Will the common fear play out, or will we pump right through it?

So to summarize what I'm looking at this week: watching to see if we can hold above Friday's spike for continuation higher, or if we start cleaning up the unfinished business below. The gap isn't going away on its own.

📰 News This week

Here’s to patience, learning, and profits!