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

Iran is not the cause of this weakness. Iran is the snowflake that caused the avalanche. Look at the consolidation that was happening at the top of this market before the war started. That was the real problem. The market was trying to break out and could not do it. The fragility was already there. Iran just revealed it. That matters because it means a ceasefire does not fix it. The thing that actually fixes it is a sweep of real bullish economic data. Tech, economy, rates moving in the right direction. Without that we rally to the 200-day moving average and stall there. The private credit issue does not go away because Iran made a deal. So where are we right now on the chart? The downward channel is still intact. This morning we were sitting about 4-5 points above the upper perimeter of that channel. That is not