NQ Starts Under Its Expected Move
NQ and ES sit under their daily expected-move lows before the bell. Overnight the board sent 14 hourly UW alerts, three of them bullish on the index board, and price traded through all three. Here is what confirms them, and what changes the picture.
Thursday, October 22, 2026
The bell hasn't rung, and NQ is already outside today's range. At 7:44 a.m. ET it traded at 29,507, under the bottom of its daily expected move at 29,623.45 and 490.75 points under Wednesday's 4:00 close. ES is in the same spot at 7,724.75, under its band low at 7,732.15. Overnight, every index alert on our board was bullish. Price went through all three. So which one do you trust, the tape or the alert?
Neither one on its own. An alert is an event. It tells you a level got tapped and where buyers showed up before. It doesn't tell you they show up again. You confirm it with the other pieces: the band, the sweep, and the first 5-minute bar.
Here's the board. From Wednesday's 6 p.m. ET reopen to the run, the UW board sent 14 prints: 14 hourlies, 0 Daily, 0 Weekly. MedianReclaim sent 12 Daily median tags and 2 Weekly median tags, 14 tags, no repeats. Every count is a Discord alert from imbalance-alert-router.
Three of the 14 UW prints were on the index board, and all three were bullish. The NQ hourly bull 29636 printed at 11:33 p.m. ET. The YM hourly bull 52774 printed at 2:27 a.m. The ES hourly bull 7727.75 printed at 3:07 a.m. Each one got tested. NQ traded down to 29,417 at 5:01 a.m., ES to 7,710.25 at 5:40 a.m. and YM to 52,644 at 6:00 a.m. YM is back over its level. ES and NQ are under theirs.
Meta and Tesla reported after Wednesday's close, and today is the first cash session to trade both. No Mag 8 name reports after today's close or before Friday's open.
Here's what printed, session by session, and what we're doing about it.
Asia: two bull levels, one
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