9:27 am Eastern  - (Keep refreshing this page up until 9:45 am. I'll will continue to update. The levels for today are shown above and in the chart below. More details to follow...)

I've been studying the charts most of the morning, and I got involved in a pre-open short trade against SPY 658.20 - one of the levels identified for today - and it worked out well.

They got price under the gap at 659.03. And they're below the daily 200-period MA. This looks bearish, of course, but there will be plenty of traders who see this kind of thing as the SPY being on sale. Time to buy. I do not advocate attempting to get in front of momentum, whichever way it's trending, and trade on hope. Price could still go either direction today. There are levels of support below current price that could be targets for the bears. The bulls will need to defend them. And those bull-bear battles are what we need to happen so we can pull Base Hits during the reactions - if there are reactions.

The level at 661.31 is a place price needs to get above for the door to open more for the bulls to possibly take over more and move price higher. As we've been saying, the more the bulls let price drip lower, the more places of overhead resistance are left behind. So getting the big picture trend to change to bullish now would take a lot of effort by the bulls. The other levels on the board today would typically be support and/or resistance, if the market is acting normally. And today, it's probably safe to say that moves could be wider than usual. So, maybe not "normal" market behavior. So be careful. Before trading against a level, understand what the longer timeframe charts are saying. Additional confirmation at the levels would be good. And give the levels more wiggle room. Expect there to be bigger than usual spikes through the levels, so adjust position size accordingly to minimize risk.

Down at 645.60 is a level that coincides with an old trendline. It may or may not hold if price gets down that far - especially if momentum and volatility pick up. But that area around 645.60 is a place the bulls would want price to be on top of in the bigger picture.

It's about 9:44 am now, as I write this, so I'll stop now. Hopefully the above information is helpful for today. A lot hinges on understanding where price is the big picture. If I trade today, I will be keeping an eye on all the longer timeframe charts, looking for clues. Trade well today.

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

Price was reasonably well-behaved today. The trades were good. Everything was by the book. 

The first trade was a short against 658.20 at 9:51 am. That trade was a wash when price got within the 10-cent profit objective but instead of handing over a Base Hit (4 ES points) it reverted back to breakeven. So you closed out the trade at breakeven, just in case. That level did end up acting as overhead resistance and pulled price back down a bit, but we don't necessarily know who will win these battles, and so we follow the rules. In this case, there were no points playing by the rules, but from the bigger picture perspective, the level worked as designed for overall resistance for part of the day.

Price never got above the 658.20 level for long enough to get into a Recycle Trade on the long side there, but eventually, price made it up to 659.72. And going short in the E-minis when SPY hit that level at 11:08 am gave you Base Hit number 1.

The next time price hit 658.20 it was 3:02 pm, and we did not attempt to short it there again - because the first hit is the best hit. And you can see why we have this rule. Price sliced right through that level on the retest at 3:02 pm.

Price went up to 661.31 and hit it at 3:06 pm. Going short there was the plan. There was a slight pullback but not enough for a Base Hit and not enough to call it a Near Miss. So you had to be willing to let the trade develop. We talked about giving the levels more wiggle room this morning. After about 8 minutes or so, if you withstood that out-of-money period of time and waited for price to find the resistance needed for them to pull back, they gave you Base Hit number 2. No rules were broken.

Then price came back down into 659.72 again and the Recycle Trade on the long side was triggered at 3:26 pm. That was still within our timeframe to get into new trades. It worked well, as price bounced nicely there. That was Base Hit number 3.

Per the rules, a total of 12 ES points for the day.