CPI Week Opens With 7800 Overhead Doc’s SPX Daily Plan — Monday, August 10
The S&P 500 starts the week near 7750 with cheap volatility, negative gamma overhead, and the biggest position on the board sitting above the all-time high.
Doc’s SPX Daily Plan — Monday, August 10: CPI Week Opens With 7800 Overhead
The S&P 500 starts the week near 7750 with cheap volatility, negative gamma overhead, and the biggest position on the board sitting above the all-time high.
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🧭 CONTEXT
At 6:15 AM ET the S&P 500 is flat. Overnight ran a 30-point range, roughly 7740 to 7770, entirely inside Friday’s range.
Friday closed at 7757.64, up 0.82%, just above a cluster of dealer long positioning at 7750. Gamma zero sits with it. Above that line dealers dampen moves; below it they amplify them.
That makes 7750 a character line, not a magic number — and we’re sitting on the top edge of it.
🌪️ VIX is 15.5 overnight. Friday’s sub-15 print was a weekend mark — throw it out. Vol is still cheap, IV Rank in single digits, but the front end has already started firming before the data shows up.
Ten days ago the market was pricing a real chance of another rate hike. September odds sat at 55%. One soft jobs report knocked them to 42%, and the conversation flipped to when the Fed cuts.
Party on, Garth.
That’s the week’s tension. The market repriced calm fast, and now CPI Wednesday, PPI Thursday, and Retail Sales Friday each get a vote on whether that repricing holds.
Cheap vol isn’t bearish on its own. It means the cushion is thin if something challenges the story.
🛢️ Oil is another variable sitting under Wednesday’s CPI print. Iran headlines have been reversing, and energy is the loosest part of the inflation story right now.
A soft headline CPI driven mostly by energy tells us less than broad cooling in core, shelter, and services. Even a clean-looking headline number may need a second look.
Monday and Tuesday are positioning days.
You can’t trade the CPI number — nobody knows it yet. What you can control is how you’re set up when it prints
NEWLY ADDED; SPX Iron Condor PREMIUM SELLER SECTION
🗓️ EVENTS & EARNINGS
Monday — BRK.B BMO
Tuesday — SMCI AMC
Wednesday — 8:30 AM ET July CPI · Weekly VIX expiration · NBIS BMO · CSCO AMC · CRWV AMC
Thursday — PPI · JD BMO · AMAT AMC
Friday — Retail Sales
Implied moves: NBIS 17% · CRWV 14% · SMCI 14% · AMAT 10% · CSCO 8%
⚠️ Wednesday is crowded — CPI, a weekly VIX expiry, and three of the AI infrastructure names on the same session. CPI is the main event. The expiry is a mechanical wrinkle.
The cohort runs all week: SMCI Tuesday, NBIS, CSCO and CRWV Wednesday, AMAT Thursday.
Individually these are earnings moves. What matters is whether they start resolving in the same direction. That read-through can move through semis and hyperscalers into SPX.
Watch what leads on any print. Cyclicals, financials, small caps, homebuilders. If the move is mega-cap only, it’s weaker than the index level suggests.
⚠️ A NOTE ON THE GAMMA SIGN
Worth clearing up, because it changes how you read everything below.
Most free gamma charts will show positive gamma above spot this morning. Ours shows negative.
That’s a sign convention, not a data conflict. Those services assume dealers are long whatever customers buy. On our board, customers are long the calls overhead, which puts dealers short them.
Long gamma creates dampening, mean-reverting pressure. Short gamma creates amplifying, pro-cyclical hedging.
Negative gamma isn’t inherently downside. Dealers hedge with the move, whichever direction price is traveling.
Today that structure is overhead
Red = NEGATIVE GAMMA
Chart = OPTIONS DEPTH
🔄 If this is useful, pass it along. Most people trading SPX have never checked which way their gamma chart is signed.
📏 LEVELS & LINES — THE PLAYING FIELD
The three-day box: 7700 to 7795.
Wednesday’s open made the all-time high just under 7795 and never went back. The low came in just under 7700.
Two sessions of digestion since. Friday tightened it further — 7720 to 7765 — and closed at the top.
🎯 7750 — the axis. Dealer long cluster with gamma zero sitting on it. Character line and center of gravity.
🧱 7765 — the near ceiling. Friday’s high and the top of the recent chop.
⚡ 7765 to 7795 — thin. Little structural inventory through here. That stretch ends where the contested upper zone begins.
📦 7720–7725 — the near floor. Positive gamma at 7725, Friday’s low at 7720, tested twice and held both times.
📦 7700 — the real floor. Second gamma-zero area and the bottom of the three-day range. Lose it and hedging becomes more amplifying.
⚠️ 7690–7675 — downside extension. Below 7700, 7690 is the first lower waypoint. The broader change-of-character area sits near 7675
📐 THE RAILS
8/10 Monday 0DTE
EM/Straddle: 29.70 · Ref. SPX 7765
7735 <> 7795
8/12 Wednesday CPI
EM/Straddle: 65.40 · Ref. SPX 7760
7695 <> 7825
8/14 Friday
EM/Straddle: 88.35 · Ref. SPX 7760
7670 <> 7850
8/21 Friday Aug OPEX
EM/Straddle: 130.50 · Ref. SPX 7765
7635 <> 7895
Rails decay all session. This is the open, not a level that holds.
🔥 Above the near ceiling, the structure changes. The stretch from 7795 through 7830 is contested — long and short inventory alternate, so hedging can flip direction every few points.
The largest position on the board sits inside it at 7800, above the all-time high, and dealers are short it.
A rail tells you distance. Structure tells you what happens on arrival.
Where the two overlap, the reference becomes more useful. Today those overlaps are clean on one side and not the other.
💰 New this week: a dedicated SPX premium sellers section. Iron condor and credit spread sellers get their own read on where distance and structure actually line up.
Today, one side of the board has a clean overlap. The other doesn’t.
That section runs below, after the Road Map.
Everything above is the playing field. Below is how to navigate it — the deeper gamma read overhead, the volatility and positioning frame heading into CPI, the complete IF/THEN Road Map, Premium Sellers, and today’s TradingView strings.
Subscribe to get the full plan every morning before the open.
NEW- Premium SELLERS section for SPX Iron Condors
