Expiration Date

Friday, October 16, 2026

The overnight highs had a shelf life, and on expiration Friday it ran out at the opening bell. In New York our board put five buy levels under the index futures. The first four broke. The fifth, an NQ hourly bull at 29283.25 at 3:06 p.m. ET, came within 15 points of the low of the day. From Thursday's 6 p.m. ET Globex reopen to Friday's 4:00 p.m. cash close, PonoTrading's imbalance board sent 28 hourly setups, 5 Daily, and 1 Weekly to Discord — 34 SENT prints. MedianReclaim added 20 Daily median tags and 3 Weekly median tags (23 SENT rows). Nineteen of those UW prints were the overnight prints we counted in this morning's prep (16 hourlies, 2 Daily, 1 Weekly). Fifteen more came after it, twelve of them in the New York cash session. Ten of the 34 were on the index board, and five of those were the Nasdaq. The levels that mattered: the RTY Daily bear 2786.5 and the YM hourly bear 52635 from overnight, MedianReclaim's ES Weekly median at 7802.125, and then in cash the NQ hourly bull 29859.5, YM hourly bull 52504, ES hourly bull 7749.75, NQ Daily bull 29549.75 and NQ hourly bull 29283.25. The last SENT print of the session came at 3:06 p.m. ET.

It was October's monthly options expiration, and the selling started at the open and didn't really stop. The S&P 500 fell 84.62 points, or 1.1%, to 7,659.44. The Nasdaq dropped 572.99 points, or 2.1%, to 26,140.03. The Dow slipped 175.28 points, or 0.3%, to 52,002.41. The Russell 2000 lost 45.90 points, or 1.7%, to 2,721.37. Chip stocks took more of the hit. Micron fell 5.6% and Intel lost 5.8%, by the Associated Press's count. The 10-year yield ended the day about where