Sunday’s plan held the score at -1 and left both buy orders below the market. Both filled on their first touch Wednesday, the fifth straight week that’s happened. The trade ran about a hundred points into the Fed and came out flat. We got the entry right and the exit wrong.
Four lower highs in a row was the shape of it. Monday’s peace gap opened strong and gave it all back, Tuesday recovered a little, and Wednesday the Fed took the lot: the S&P fell 1.52%, the Dow lost 2.19% for its worst day of 2026, the Nasdaq 100 slid into correction and the VIX closed above 20 for the first time in weeks. ES traded a 177-point range, nearly twice a normal session, settled 7,351.25, and is back to 7,385 overnight.
The Lie: -1 CAUTIOUS, held. Two of the five inputs improved, two got worse, same score. Breakdown below.
The Fed held at 3.50-3.75% with three votes to raise. The move that mattered was in Treasuries, and it went the opposite way to what that headline implies. The 2-year fell about 4 basis points to roughly 4.24%. The 30-year rose 11, to 5.21%, its highest in nineteen years. The dollar fell 0.7% from a fifteen-month high.
Read those together. Three officials voted to hike and the market responded by trimming the odds of a September move, which is what a lower 2-year says. Then it charged eleven basis points more for thirty-year paper anyway. That’s not a bet on the funds rate. That’s the price of duration going up on a central bank that’s scrapped its own forward guidance and publishes no projections, with inflation at 3.7% and crude up a fifth in a month. It reaches stocks through the multiple: at 20 times forward earnings the long end is the one input that has to sit still, and it isn’t.
Below the fold: the full scorecard, the new map and the pivot that decides the week, the plan, three setups each with the exact spot to act at, and why option premiums flipped from rich to cheap in three sessions.
