Pre-close View… Hijacked!

Bearish setup gets distracted by shiny metal object (a gun).

Nothing about this morning’s price action was bullish. A lot of selling pressure had been expended just to probe back into Thursday’s range without actually reversing it. But the bias environment wasn’t exited above any relevant level. The opportunity to trap the morning’s sellers was not exploited.

The noon hour’s bounce tested the afternoon’s bias-up signal. It didn’t trigger. Probing above it anyway was “no-bias trending” that was doomed to failure. It did fail, and price was falling further. Retracing the rest of Thursday’s rally was about to begin.

That’s when a headline crossed about the capitol visitor’s center shooting. Like last week’s Brussels event, it created a distraction from the distributive price action — not additional selling pressure, but selling pressure that the original selling pressure allowed to run its course.

So, the headline reaction has been retraced. Not to a fresh high like Brussels last Tuesday, but that wasn’t required being so much later in the session. The distribution described all day is now free to resume pressuring price back down. A fresh afternoon low today or tomorrow morning would be expected to resume the ongoing pullback.