Today’s recap is one lesson: when a strong support or resistance level gets sliced through like it doesn’t exist, price often comes back and retests it.
I’ve seen this hundreds of times. Don’t take my word for it. Mark it on your charts and watch how often it happens.
Before the open I marked levels and wrote the plan — entries, risk, and the conditions that would stop me out. I don’t invent a new plan mid-session because I want to be in something.
I wanted longs first. SPY and QQQ had valid levels, but price was too far from where I could manage risk. A valid level is not the same as a good trade. If the gap between entry and risk is too wide, you sit. Risk first. Profit second.
So I waited for shorts.
SPY came up into Thursday’s highs. I added on the push, paid myself on the first move down, and kept a small piece because resistance was still overhead. That trade locked about $1,101. Fine. Not the main event.
QQQ was. Price ran into a major resistance level and did not reject. It went straight through it.
That’s where traders get emotional. They assume the idea is dead, flatten, flip, or decide the level no longer matters.
I don’t.
When a highly valid level gets disrespected, I expect a retest. Price can run first. It can chop. But it often comes back to the line it just broke. That return is the trade.
I was not holding an unlimited loss. Size got smaller as price went higher. Average stayed tight. That’s patience with a defined risk, not hope.
QQQ came back and tested the level it had sliced. Instead of a loss, the trade finished up more than $11,000.
Remember the distinction: a reckless trader ignores risk and prays it comes back. A patient trader sizes it, defines the stop, and lets the sequence play out.
This does **not** mean you hold every break. If your account can’t take the drawdown required to wait for the retest, take the stop. Stopping out when risk is broken is a skill. Never inflate size just so you can “wait for the retest.”
If you can’t hold this kind of move yet, study it. Find major levels that got broken. Mark the slice. See whether price came back. One example is a story. Twenty is a pattern.
Trading confidence comes from repetition. I can sit through twenty or thirty minutes of noise because I’ve seen this behavior hundreds of times. You build that the same way — watch, record, review.