Merry Christmas — and welcome to the first Post-Market Review.
Each week, we use QUANTIS to review how the market actually traded relative to its expected behavior. Not in theory, and not in hindsight — but against the distributions, probabilities, and conditions flagged in advance.
This series exists to close the feedback loop. What resolved cleanly? What failed despite favorable odds? What showed up infrequently enough to matter? Over time, these reviews form a living record of market behavior across regimes — not just individual weeks.
The objective is consistency: measure outcomes, update assumptions, and refine the playbook.
A few notes on how to approach these reviews:
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Process matters more than outcome. A correct trade taken for the wrong reason is not a success.
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Misses carry signal. Failed expectations are often more informative than clean resolutions.
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Statistics require context. A high-probability event failing is not an anomaly; a low-probability event repeating is.
Each Post-Market Review follows the same structure. We begin with what the data suggested going into the week, compare that against realized price action, and isolate the deviations that materially altered the landscape. The goal is not to explain every tick, but to identify what meaningfully shifted.
With that framing in place, let’s start with last week.
Gap Fill Review — NQ and ES
This week’s focus was gap fill behavior in NQ and ES, with an emphasis on full-session resolution.
Both markets recorded four full gap fills, each resolving to 100% completion. Given the probability context going into the week, this outcome was well within expectation. Gap direction probabilities remained balanced—approximately 58% for gap-up sessions and 59% for gap-down sessions—with no meaningful clustering beyond historical norms.
Larger gap sizes—approximately 0.45% and 1.3%—also resolved cleanly. From a distribution standpoint, these sat toward the upper end of recent observations but did not introduce abnormal behavior or suggest a regime shift. Gap magnitude, in this case, did not materially degrade fill reliability.
The key point is not the number of fills, but the absence of deviation. Realized behavior aligned closely with baseline expectations, reinforcing the existing gap-fill framework rather than challenging it.
Gold (GC) — Opening Candle Continuation
Gold presented a different form of consistency.
GC posted opening candle continuation every session this week, with no failures. While not unusual in isolation, the uninterrupted streak is notable and worth monitoring. It suggests sustained directional participation during the opening window rather than mean-reversion behavior.
On its own, this does not constitute a regime change. However, continuation without interruption is a condition that merits attention, particularly if it persists or begins to coincide with expanding ranges.