Yesterday's massive selloff...

I’ve gotten a lot of DMs since the selloff yesterday.
Most of them sound the same:

“Man… I should’ve seen that coming.”
“Why didn’t we short 6780?”
“I knew it… I knew it was the high.”

No you didn’t.

And that’s fine.
That’s how markets work.

The idea that any trader “should’ve known” a 120-point vertical move was about to unwind straight into a multi-shelf liquidation.

That’s fantasy.
That’s ego talking.
That’s hindsight polishing a story.

So I asked everyone the same thing:

“Would you be saying that if ES ripped to new highs instead?”

Because that matters.

Let me explain… yesterday here’s what actually happened

Price didn’t just “sell off.”
After bottoming on Tuesday at 6594, I wrote Wednesday and Thursday about bulls needing to prove it.

The tried.

Wednesday afternoon NVDA broke through the critical line of 6708 and Non Farm Payrolls and news 12 hours later pushed us even further.

Bulls reclaimed 3 criritcal shelves.
Then, intraday time frame shift trend.
We were hitting crtitical reclaim levels with grit.

It tried to reclaim 6776… multiple times… finally approved by buyers by 10AM and ran straight into the high time frame resistance listed that morning in the ESDaily Gameplan…

It was a stretch, not structure.
RSI rolled.
Momentum faded.
Lower timeframes flipped before the higher ones.
The trend shift that looked promising… started to crack.

Then it hit an air pocket.

And remember… I wasn’t shorting into that move.
I was long from 6662.75, scaled it into +120 points, and when we finally got to 6780, I literally said:

“Feels frothy up here.”

So I hedged.
Bought the 6770 0DTE puts for $5.
Not because I “knew.”
But because it was good risk management.

Those puts ran to $69.
A hedge.
Not a hero call.

Then the unwind started.

One shelf failed… then the next… and the next…
and suddenly every level I’d marked all week:
6748, 6737, 6723, 6694, 6654…
All failed back-to-back with no acceptance, no rotation, no bounce.

That isn’t “obvious.”
That’s structural failure.
That’s a market that had no support underneath it.
That’s tape doing tape things.

Nobody “knew.”
Nobody caught the whole thing top to bottom.

And that’s where the whole “we should’ve known” routine falls apart

It’s hindsight.
It’s ego.
It’s the brain trying to rewrite the story after the fact.

The reality is simple:

If you followed your risk plan, you did fine.
If you didn’t force trades, you did fine.
If you avoided revenge and oversized nonsense, you did fine.
If you hedged smartly, you did more than fine.

What people are actually upset about isn’t missing the move… it’s how they behaved inside the move.

And that’s the part that matters.
That’s the part that’s fixable.

I’m not trying to come down on anyone or preach.
I’ve been there.
I’ve been there with way more money on the line than I ever should’ve had.

And I’m telling you something I learned the hard way:

It’s a fool’s errand to play Monday-morning quarterback on a day that went from +2% to -2% with zero structure and zero warning.

Or pretending a 15 min divergence was going to equate to a 180 point selloff…
No it doesn’t.

You didn’t “miss the obvious.”
It wasn’t obvious.

The only mistake is pretending it was.

Cheers
PriceTrader