THE GOLD CRUNCH 

I own the YieldMax Gold Miners Option Income Strategy ETF (GDXY), which pays a monthly dividend of 3%. I bought 7,000 shares about two months ago at $9.76, and it rallied up to $12.22 in the days after I bought it. My broker actually called me and said it was a nice buy, and I'm sure he bought it for himself and some of his customers. But since the high, it has pulled back, and as of Friday it settled just above where I bought it, at $9.97. When I bought it, gold had already corrected from its all-time January high of $5,780, selling off down to the $4,010 level in late June, and was trading around $4,150 in early August. Over the next several trading days it rallied all the way up to the $4,740 area. I nailed it. I was making money on the stock and getting a 3% a month dividend. So what happened to gold after that, and why did it sell off? It got hit by the "rates and dollar" trade. Even with the wars and inflation concerns, investors/traders move out of gold when rates move up because gold pays no income, while Treasury bonds do. Friday clearly showed that. Gold jumped after the jobs report and then fell. Traders first saw slower hiring as a reason the Fed might ease, but later the inflation and rate outlook still looked difficult enough to keep yields elevated. Gold also weakened despite a small pullback in the dollar because the dollar was still headed for a weekly gain.

The slide has been building. Gold was down about 3.4% for the week and has fallen roughly 6% in September. Higher Treasury yields, a firm dollar, and oil-driven inflation fears are outweighing gold’s usual safe-haven appeal for now. I am not going to get out because even though gold fell 6% in September, I am still positive on the trade, and over the last two months I have made 6%. But I am worried that gold still has room on the downside because the Fed is going to raise rates again, which will push yields and the dollar higher. But as of right now, the markets have sharply reduced the odds of an October hike after Friday’s jobs report to below 20%. So a hike would likely surprise the market and could pressure gold, especially if yields and the dollar rise.

In the coming weeks, I'm going to do a cross section of other futures markets.

Job Troubles

In the summer of 2025, I took Cole Anderton in as an intern. By all rights, Cole is a genius and graduated at the top of his class at UF and ran the coding class that wrote the college investing algorithm. He personally designed the execution part of the project. While I didn't write it in the LEAN last Friday, I was worried that there could be a Friday jobs revision. I actually read something that said the nonfarm payroll number could come in at 30K. The bottom line is there is less hiring and fewer job openings too. Before September's +29,000, the previous month below +30,000 was July 2026. BLS now estimates July payrolls fell by 10,000. It was first reported as −23,000, then revised to +21,000, and later revised down again. Below is a graph I made of nonfarm payrolls going back to January 2020. What I am worried about is the effects of AI and higher trends, which is the reason I mentioned Cole, who, like thousands of other college students, is finding it hard to get a job or a good job.

I think the effects of Ai job loss is real and while it may not be negative right now I can see a problem in the future. For the U.S. One five-year forecast puts gross job displacement from AI and automation at about 10.4 million jobs by 2030, or roughly 6.1%. That’s Forrester’s estimate, not a consensus forecast and it counts roles displaced, not people who will necessarily remain unemployed although Goldman Sachs has a different estimate: about 15 million workers reallocated to new jobs over ten years. It also estimates AI has recently reduced U.S. payroll growth by roughly 16,000 jobs a month and raised unemployment by about 0.1 percentage point https://www.goldmansachs.com/insights/goldman-sachs-exchanges/how-will-ai-impact-the-labor-market. That maybe true but as Ai and robotics replace humans I have a feeling this will get a lot worse over a longer time frame.

The ES opened Thursday evening at 7724.00, dipped to 7723.25 and climbed to a Globex high of 7802.75. The overnight segment finished at 7789.50, a 65.50-point gain from its opening price. That put buyers in control of the move into the cash open, with much of the day’s recovery already established before regular trading began.

Cash trade opened at 7789.50 and extended to 7810.25 during the 10:40–10:45 a.m. ET bar. The rally then gave way to a pullback: the 11:25–11:30 a.m. bar reached the regular-session low of 7754.00. Buyers recovered some ground, but the regular session closed at 7779.00, down 10.50 points from its open. The 3:50 p.m. last-trade snapshot was 7779.25; the separate 4:00 p.m. snapshot was 7780.00.

Cleanup trade finished at 7776.50 at 5:00 p.m. The official settlement was 7777.25, up 53.25 points from Thursday’s settlement. Five-minute bar volume totaled 1,762,002 contracts; official cleared volume was separately reported at 2,214,495.

NQ followed a similar intraday pattern: its regular session opened at 31147.75, reached 31282.50, fell to 30988.00 and closed at 31070.00. Its final five-minute bar closed at 31049.00. Both contracts recovered from their overnight opens, but neither held its cash-session opening price through the regular close. Monday’s job is to turn that recovery into follow-through.

Overall, Friday felt like a recovery that ran into sellers, with plenty of two-way trade. The ES did most of its lifting overnight, then swung through a 56.25-point cash-session range and finished below its cash open. Five-minute bar volume totaled 1.76 million contracts, while official cleared volume was 2.21 million. NQ covered 294.50 points during regular trading and also closed below its open. The higher ES settlement kept the rebound intact, but the failure to hold the morning highs left it feeling more like a contested recovery than a market ready to run.

Early MOC Buying Failed to Hold

Friday’s 3:51 p.m. ET MOC reveal opened with a buy imbalance. The MIM All Markets dashboard showed $1.6 billion to buy ($1,575M displayed), with $4.5 billion of buy orders against $3.0 billion of sells. Buy-side symbols led 361 to 322 across 683 names: a 60.5% dollar buy share, but only 52.9% of symbols.

NYSE showed $982.6 million to buy, while the NQ stock basket showed $584.8 million to buy with its symbol count split 50–50. The overlapping S&P 500 basket showed $1.9 billion to buy. Those baskets should not be added together.

META led the displayed individual buys at $393.1 million, followed by GOOG at $275.9 million and MSFT at $255.4 million. TSLA led the sells at $234.3 million, with SPCX at $199.0 million and AVGO at $123.2 million. These are individual imbalances, not substitutes for the market total.

Communication Services supplied $871.7 million of net buying and Information Technology added $463.7 million. Consumer Discretionary pushed the other way with $397.2 million to sell. The early buying had substantial dollar weight, but the modest symbol advantage argued against treating it as uniform demand.

The dashboard’s minute sequence shows why follow-through mattered: the net buy faded to $989.0 million at 3:52 and $740.0 million at 3:54, then flipped to $1.7 billion to sell at 3:55. Buying briefly returned before another sell reversal at 3:59; the 4:00 minute reading was $255.0 million to sell. The trading test after the early reveal was whether buy dollars and symbol breadth could hold together. They did not.

Prepare the plan before the opening bell, then compare notes as the session develops. The PitBull Traders room offers a place to discuss market structure and execution with other traders.

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Economic Calendar

• Monday, October 5, 10:00 a.m. ET — September ISM Services PMI. Official release notice.

Watch the employment and prices components alongside the headline and the response in Treasury yields. This is the confirmed event highlighted for the session, rather than a complete release calendar.

Earnings Calendar

Friday improved, but the full week remained narrow: combined upside volume was 60% for the day and 49% for the week. Combined advancing-issue share was 59% for the day and 37% for the week. These percentages exclude unchanged issues and volume.

Polaris Trading Group

Friday, October 2 — PTGDavid’s commentary followed the post-jobs-report rally into Cycle Day 2 objectives, then shifted to the reversal and risk management.

Early objectives

• At 8:39 a.m. ET, David identified the upper Money Box 2 and a Cycle Day 2 range objective at 7800.83.

• By 9:02 a.m., he reported that NQ had fulfilled its three-day cycle target at 31151 and ES had exceeded its target at 7772. Those were Friday’s room references.

Execution and reversal

• At 10:30 a.m., David said there would be no opening-range trades because Sierra had a server configuration issue.

• Later commentary described an A4 short with a runner. At 11:18 a.m., he identified a reversal from the ES Cycle Day 2 penetration level at 7810.

• At 11:20 a.m., he described moving the trailing stop to the most recent pivot high, then tightening it as the move developed.

Takeaway

• David closed his morning commentary by emphasizing selectivity and his highest-quality setups.

• The practical lesson is to distinguish a reached objective from a fresh entry signal, and to manage risk as structure changes. The trade comments above are David’s reports, rather than independently verified account results.

DTG Room Preview

NJ@DTG’s Monday, October 5 preparation in IMPRO weighs AI-led index support against rising yields, dollar strength and energy-related headline risk. The post emphasizes the ES trading range and the morning services reports.

Market backdrop

• NJ sees AI and megacap technology supporting ES and NQ, while YM and RTY remain more exposed to yield spikes and tighter financial conditions.

• His cross-asset watch includes the stronger dollar, European fiscal pressure, mixed crude-supply signals, tanker-route risks and energy-sector legal uncertainty.

Monday catalysts

• Services reports: S&P Global at 9:45 a.m. ET and ISM at 10:00 a.m. ET, as listed in NJ’s preparation. Watch Treasury yields, crude and geopolitical headlines around those windows.

• NJ lists no corporate earnings of interest for Monday. His Tuesday watch is RPM International before the open and Constellation Brands after the close.

ES price map

• Working range: 7,650–7,850. NJ says the short-term downtrend channel capped Friday’s high.

• Trendline resistance: 7,811–7,816, then 7,993–7,998.

• Trendline support: 7,676–7,681, followed by 7,435–7,440 and 7,410–7,415.

• NJ identifies the 50-day moving average at 7,743.25 as potential loose support after Friday’s close above it.

Tactical watch

• No whale bias: NJ says overnight large-trader volume was too light to be significant.

• NJ reports a five-day ES average daily range of 79.00 points. His setup calls for attention to headline-driven volatility and sector dispersion; the levels above are his references, not trade results.