Break out or break down?  TPTB love holiday weekends, as they can push prices through resistance more easily while everyone’s on holiday.

The bots are pushing USDJPY higher; but, a muted impact so far on ES.  Traders might be nervous after yesterday’s weak close (on an otherwise strong day for no reason whatsoever) that saw SPX return to the 1.272/1.618 Fib level we discussed.

Many of us have noted the shenanigans going on in VIX in the last minutes or even seconds of trading.  By slamming VIX lower, an algo forces prices higher — one of many manipulations occurring in the “markets” these days.

For those who haven’t seen it, yesterday’s Nanex article explains what’s going on:

There is a new High Frequency Trading  (HFT) Algo afoot, probably designed to measure, or cause system latency. This algo sends extreme bursts of 1-share orders in a symbol to two different exchanges: Nasdaq and BATS. The result is a system-impacting surge of quote updates, similar to quote stuffing, but accompanied by an extremely high number of 1-share trade executions. These trade executions often consume the entire SIP output line, as indicated by continuous sequence numbers with no gaps. continued…