I'm not worried about the gap down. I'm worried about the recovery. Here's why that matters. SPY has been building a bear flag since late February. A bear flag is what happens when the market sells off hard, bounces sideways in a descending channel, and then breaks lower. It looks like a pause. It isn't. The market is just catching its breath before the next leg down. What confirmed it today was the MACD cross, a momentum indicator that tells you when the trend has shifted. The last time we got this exact setup, a cross right at the tip of the flag, we sold off, had one more bounce, and then dropped hard. That's the pattern playing out right now. Two scenarios for this week. One, we get a gap down from some Iran-related headline and just start bleeding from there. Two, we grind up toward the 200-period moving

Trading is not complicated. It just feels that way. Last Monday in Game Plan, a SPY put zone triggered at the open. I paid a $1.80. Closed it at $3 in ten minutes. 63% gain. The zone was drawn before the market open. The picture was already there. All I did was color inside the lines. The market draws the picture for you. A channel is a price range the market keeps returning to. A ceiling it tends to reject from. A floor it tends to bounce off. The levels, the zones. It is all right there. Your job is not to predict what happens next. Your only job is to color inside the lines. That is it. That is the whole thing. I have been watching this particular channel for weeks. And if you’ve been reading Trading Today you’ve probably seen me show this chart: Upper boundary, lower boundary,

Most people are getting whipsawed in this market right now. This morning SPY opened lower. Then it bounced, even went positive for a stretch. Most traders did not know what to do with that. Were they supposed to buy the bounce or fade it? The market gave mixed signals all session. I was not confused. The chart told me what was coming before the open. Here is the bigger picture. We have been inside a downward channel since January. Price stacks lower highs and lower lows. Same story, week after week. Bearish conditions. Not a bear market, but bearish conditions, meaning violent rallies happen inside this kind of trend. That is what makes them dangerous. They feel like recoveries. They are not. This week gave us two green days. People started talking about a bottom. What I saw was a wick looking for resistance at the point of control. The