The Calm After the Chip Storm
Thursday's chip selloff left NQ settled under its 2× expected-move low. Overnight our alert board went quiet: 7 hourly UW prints, none on the index futures. The bands got wider. Here's the frame for the open.
Friday, October 23, 2026
Thursday was loud. NQ settled at 29,142, under its 2× expected-move low at 29,239.90, on a day the chip stocks sold off hard. Then the board went quiet. From the 6 p.m. ET reopen to the run, our alert board sent seven prints, all hourly, and not one was on the index futures. No Daily. No Weekly. So what do you do with a quiet board after a loud day?
You don't fill the silence. A quiet board isn't a calm market. It means no UW level on ES, NQ, YM or RTY got tapped overnight. The bands did the talking instead. They re-anchored off Thursday's settle and got wider: NQ's daily expected move is now ±438.08, up from ±383.55 on Thursday. ES is at ±76.74, up from ±68.10. Both start inside.
Here's the board. From Thursday's 6 p.m. ET reopen to the run, the UW board sent 7 prints: 7 hourlies, 0 Daily, 0 Weekly. MedianReclaim sent 9 Daily median tags and 0 Weekly median tags, 9 tags, no repeats. Every count is a Discord alert from imbalance-alert-router.
The only index tags were on YM, both from MedianReclaim. YM tagged its prior Daily median at 52887 at 3:09 a.m. ET and its prior Daily lower median at 52856 at 3:28 a.m. Then it kept going. It traded through Thursday's low at 52,703 and got back above it.
No Mag 8 name reports before today's open or after today's close.
Here's what printed, session by session, and what we're doing about it.
Asia: one print, crude
What printed on our board. One UW print. Crude hourly bull 98.94 at 6:36 p.m. ET. That's it for Asia.
MedianReclaim sent six Daily tags in Asia. The yen's Daily median at 0.00641325 at 8:05 p.m. The Nikkei's Daily median at 62235
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