4 Catalysts Showed Up And The Market Yawned At Every One.

The market is looking for a catalyst, and it keeps striking out.

I don't know what that catalyst is. I wish I did. But look at what we've already handed it and gotten nothing for.

It could have been PPI. It wasn't. It could have been bank earnings. It wasn't. It could be the Fed. It wasn't. It could be Iran. It wasn't.

Four chances to move this thing, guys, and we did not get a single gap up or a single gap down out of any of them. That's what has my attention right now, and it matters more than any one of those headlines did.

Because this summer is a little different.

Go back to last summer and we had that straight up boring channel, grinding higher with a pullback here and there. Easy. This summer we are not grinding. We are consolidating into a pennant, which is just price coiling into a tighter and tighter range until it runs out of room.

And a pennant means we're going to get a big move. That's the whole deal. But that big move needs to be met with a catalyst, and we have not gotten one.

And we are tracking two of the same pennants right now with two completely different reactions. SPY is attempting to break out. The QQQ is attempting to break down.

I'm following SPY for now because I like the wicking action, and I like a retest of price action. That piques my interest. On the QQQ, unless we savagely sell off, that's a different story.

Both of these are coming from strength, so this looks like a bull flag, and according to textbook it most likely breaks out to the upside.

My path of least resistance is to the upside.

But I'm not going to sit here and tell you textbook always wins, because we've seen pennants fail. That fail needs a gap down, the same way a confirmation needs a gap up. I don't want to go too deep in the weeds on it, but you need to understand what's at stake.

Time is the enemy.

The longer this trades like this, the more likely it is going to fall. That's it. A pennant sitting here without a catalyst does not stay a bullish pennant forever. It gets tired, and it goes looking for the volume profile underneath it.

We need a catalyst soon to the upside for this to be a bullish pennant.

So that's why I'm not sitting here obsessing over what PPI said, or what the banks reported, or what the Fed does next. The market already told us how it feels about all four of them. It shrugged.

What I want is a gap. Something with enough force to take us out of this pattern in one direction, and until we get it, anything in between is chop.

We are holding this pennant. It's looking bullish into the next few sessions. We might be a little down tomorrow. We just need that catalyst to break higher.

Watch for the gap, guys. That's your tell.

Rock On,

Voz

P.S. Four catalysts this week and not one of them was it. PPI, the banks, the Fed, Iran. Nothing. But somebody wasn't confused this week, guys. Somebody was already positioned before any of those printed, and they didn't need a headline to tell them where to be. That's what my partner Mark and I built Wiretap to catch. Tomorrow, Thursday July 16 at 7pm, Mark and Hannah Selner are going live, free, to show you the system that flags the single most suspicious trade every week. They're calling it "Everything Is Fraud." Don't miss it.