SCHEDULED NEWS
OPTIONS VOLITILITY LEVELS
📬 IMPORTANT — Check Your Spam Folder! To make sure you never miss a morning trade plan, please whitelist rbailey@vicitradingsolutions.com and info@vicitradingsolutions.com in your email client. Drag any VICI email out of Spam and into your Primary inbox so these land where they belong every single morning.
📈 Get the SPX Morning Brief — Free. Delivered to your inbox at 5:40 a.m. EST every trading day. Sign up here: https://pages.vicitradingsolutions.com/spx-edge
Good morning everyone. Today is Thursday, August 20th, and we come off another awesome day in the trade plan. We called the squeeze above that gamma flip level at 7720, ultimately pushing us up above our significant 4-Hour at 7731.50 — which was very important on Tuesday — and the Daily at 7737, sending us skyrocketing higher all the way into our major resistance with the 4-Hour at 7767, where it appears that was the high of the day.
Congratulations to all those who took advantage of that squeeze call-out, and also to those who remained disciplined, traded the process, and held their bearish stance. As we can see, the market is still coming down from yesterday’s high, which was a beautiful call. Congratulations to all those who took advantage of this amazing price action.
Now coming into the morning, we find ourselves sliding lower. The market is down over 35 points at the time of this writing and seems to be moving lower still. We are at the lows of the morning and also the lows of the week.
A Note on Today’s Market:
News: No Red Tag news to speak of. However, we do have the Philly Fed Manufacturing Index and Unemployment Change at 8:30 a.m. This is not Red Tag news, but we should certainly be aware of it happening.
Volume: Relative Volume is up over 56% at the time of this writing, telling us we could approximately move another 25 points above or below the overnight highs or lows. This does give us confidence that we could get a move today, so we will keep an eye on it as we gauge what kind of trades are being made.
Range: Expected range of 55 points. We have already moved 53.25 points, meaning we have already met our expectations for the day in terms of expected range. Relative volume is what extends our runway from here.
Gamma: We are very much in a Negative Gamma regime this morning. The gamma flip level has moved down slightly from yesterday, as they’ve repositioned it at 7720, and price has pushed well beneath that as we’ve approached the 7690s. This means dealers are hedging their positions to the downside and expecting more potential lows. This also gives us a massive area to watch for price to be above or below, as dealers will be hedging and protecting this area.
Trend: Downside lean. We are currently pointed down on the Daily, 4-Hour, and 1-Hour time frames. The only time frame we are still pointed up on is the Weekly. As we know, our three major time frames tend to point us in the right direction as we continue to slip down over the past few days. Our process continues to lead us in the right direction and should not be taken for granted.
🧠 Current Market Context
Distribution, Open Air & The Weekly TPO Gap
Right now we are certainly slipping lower as we come into the lower area we projected last week — trying to fill the weekly TPO gap all the way down at 7640. Our higher time frame still points us lower, as we’ve had a massive balance move sideways for a week and a half after our exponential move up from two Tuesdays ago. That looked like distribution to us, and we called it out as such.
We had VIX beginning to get into the lower handles of the $14–$15 range, where I put out a post insinuating this pullback could happen. It’s simply something that happens as VIX gets too oversold. Now we see VIX absolutely spiking as we get ready to approach the $16 handle. It continues to look like it wants more upside, just as the indices look like they want more downside.
The VIX Is at Its 2026 Low — And History Says It Doesn’t Stay
Let me get one thing out of the way before we start.
