SPX failed to get any upside momentum going today. Intraday price action was incredibly choppy and SPX spent most of the day stuck inside of a very narrow range. The premarket news was certainly there with a ‘good’ CPI print, but SPX was unable to build off that initial pop.

Honestly today feels like a missed opportunity for the bulls. We had good earnings from some of the top financial companies and one of the better CPI reports we’ve seen in a long time. The news was there but the sentiment and momentum were nowhere to be found.

The candle from today lives entirely within the candle from yesterday. We did not break yesterday’s range on either side and thus ended up printing a pretty textbook looking doji. A classic sign of indecision. The theory yesterday was that the market had not dipped enough for dip buyers to step in with conviction. That theory now spills over into today because the candle is screaming indecision.

The immediate task for the market is to break the range of Monday’s candle, which would make the first key levels be 7565 and 7505.

I am going to switch things up a little today and show a chart of /ES as I think it better highlights the intraday price action from today. The red lines are the range set by the initial candle from the CPI reaction. As soon as the news broke, we had a huge 52 point candle pushing higher. The rest of the day, for over 7 hours, we never even came close to that range again.

In fact, as the grey box shows, the majority of trade today occurred in just a narrow 15 point range. Pretty uneventful for a day that had the news potential to create a strong rally.

I think today was a loss for the bulls. They did not take the opportunity to run prices higher. Earnings will continue to roll in tomorrow and we also have the PPI report. This is another opportunity for the bulls to take charge.

If they are unable to push things higher, I think that is a sign of more downside price action to occur.

For now, we will take it one step at a time and use those levels marked above as the guardrails for the market. Ideally we see that range broken tomorrow on at least one side.

Good luck!