9:05 am Eastern  -  The trendline is still in play right now. After falling away from the trendline area yesterday and getting about 70 points or so below it, they have worked their way back up to the trendline during the premarket this morning. For today, the trendline runs from 695.44 down to 695.20 by the close of today. It's sloping downward. Already, as I write this - about 8:42 am, price has tagged the trendline by getting to a high of 696.45 and pulled away a few points so far. The bulls want to get on top of this thing, and 700 is still a target. Nothing about that has changed.

Also, the bear axis zone from yesterday - between 692.12 and 691.66 - continued to be important in the overnight session. If price gets back down there, there could be a bounce from there, but it depends on how things look in real time on larger timeframes charts. Like with the trendline zone, that zone below current price is a gauge and reference. Not tradeable levels unless you see good reasons in real time to trade against them. Right now, price is in between these two zones. I'd rather price get outside the zone - whether above or below - before trading anything. The other levels are typical levels of probable support and resistance and should be played per the rules to give you the highest likelihood of pulling points and dollars from the market.

The area around SPY 700 is likely to cause some bull-bear battles if price gets up there today. But price has been spending a lot of time under 700, so there is also a chance that the buy-the-breakout crowd shows up and spikes 700 by a lot. Remember we were talking about the Transports, the DJT in the last Weekly Recap Video? Well, look at what happened in the DJT yesterday. They spiked 20,000 and are currently pulling back. So far, this is exactly what we said would happen. The question is, will the SPY do the same with 700, if they get there soon? It's hard to say. Recall that the DJT was rocketing up toward 20,000. Very extended to the upside.

A pullback from a big psychological level like that is understandable. But the SPY has been slowly grinding higher toward 700. They are not extended the upside at the moment and rocketing toward it. This increases the possibility that there could be some short covering if price blasts through 700. So all the levels we have on the board today in the neighborhood of 700 - below and above - should be treated with caution. If they ever get there, there will either be a decent battle, which could move price up and down - or a big, decisive move either up or down. It really is a coin flip from where we sit now. No data releases of significance scheduled for today. Trade well!

Trading by the Ticks & Trades Strategy, here is where you would have landed for the day:

Well, the bulls couldn't get above and stay above the trendline again. And check out the DJT, if you haven't already looked at it today. There is a screenshot above of the daily chart of the DJT. We said DJT was targeting 20,000 and there was a good chance they would spike it and pull back in a big way from that area. They did that today, and SPY was affected. But what about our levels for today? How did they work?

They didn't work so well. First, while we recognized that the trendline zone was probably still important, those levels weren't intended to be traded, per the Game Plan. We wanted to give the bulls a chance to test the former highs and maybe try again for 700. Clearly, that did not happen today. Not counting any official trades at the trendline.

The bear axis zone down between 692.12 and 691.66 was another gauge/reference area. Below was better for the bear case. The levels of that zone weren't designed to be traded against. As we know now, there was an initial bounce at the top of the zone, but we're not counting that as an official trade.

Then price fell all the way down into the lower levels we had on the board for the day. Going long at 687.51 meant you added to the position by buying again at 685.75, because there was no reaction at 687.51. Neither level held though, and the max loss limit was hit 20 points below the break-even price of that combined position. That meant jumping out at a 40 S&P point loss for the doubled-in position. Price continued to fall and hit 683.98. That was another entry for a long position. This time, the level held and gave you a Base Hit or more if you were willing to hold it for more than 4 ES points. When price falls hard like that, sharp rallies can happen at the the right support area. I followed the rules exactly and I incurred a big loss on those first two levels, although I did ride the long trade from 683.98 up to 685.75, and got around 10 points. So, some of that loss was regained. 

There were no Recycle Trades on the short side of 685.75 or 683.98 because of the timing of when price came back up those levels. Price reacted nicely on the short side for both levels, but we can't count them as official trades if we're sticking to the process. This is what happens sometimes when the market is not acting "normal". The levels work better the 90% of the time when market behavior is typical. Today wasn't exactly typical.

Also, I did a quick search of all the days where I've had a double TKO like what happened today. Since I've tracked all trades using this strategy since January 2022, I have over 1,000 days of data. There were only four days in the past 4+ years where this has happened. 40 points due to two TKOs - usually when levels are averaged in like what happened today. Those four days - which includes today - is 0.39% of all days over the long run. There were a few more days where Fumbles, combined with a TKO, meant the day ended with 40 or more points given back to the market. Including those days too, put the total "bloodbath" days at 0.68%. It doesn't feel good to give a lot of dollars back to the market, but it's good to know that days like today are rare.

Per the rules, a total of -36 ES points for the day.