In this March 23, 2026 video Dave Barnhart explains why the equity market is "melting" by highlighting massive dark‑pool and late‑print trades that moved billions of dollars in SPY and QQQ. He walks through the recent 30‑day history of the largest institutional prints, shows how those trades have pushed the indices below key moving averages (200‑day SMA/EMA, 250‑day SMA, 4‑ and 8‑period EMAs), and uses that context to construct concrete intraday trade plans. For SPY he defines bullish entry zones above 644 with targets up to 658 and bearish zones below 641.87 with support levels down to 620. For QQQ he outlines bullish zones above 577 with targets near 586 and bearish zones below 574 with support down to 558. He also comments on heightened volatility, deteriorating options bid‑ask spreads, and the importance of a bias‑driven scalping approach. The video ends with a plug for his weekly dark‑pool report and a partnership with TrendSpider for real‑time institutional trade overlays.
Chapters
Good morning, traders. It's Monday, March 23rd at 4:15 a.m. Well, the market is continuing to melt, and that's kind of expected with the tens of billions of dollars that have been flowing out of the SPY. I want to share with you a tweet that I put out on Friday at the dark pool close. This is the largest trade we've had in a very long time. There's a few of them. It was options expiration, and Friday was also ex-dividend for the SPY as well. But look at this, there's 25, 26 million shares here between 652.75 and 658.02. So one was the, the late print. I think this one here, this 10.5 million, but this together is $15 billion and we're below all of that. And so I wanted to point that out. Let's look at it a different way. These are the late prints. These are the ones that are reported 24 hours late. And for good reason. This one, this one from March 20th, $658.02. This price should have been in the previous day's price and volume, but 10.5 million shares accounted for 6% of all of the volume traded was this one trade. That's the dark pools in action. 166 million shares on Friday. This was absolutely massive, especially with the OPEX and things like that. But out of this 166 million, 6% of that was this one trade, 10 million shares. Although it says 76 trades, it's exactly at the— at this price, and they're all the specific share sizes that make that up. It's a $7 billion trade. So when we look at this, all of these ones that were below, and you start adding these up, $7 billion, $3 billion, that makes $10 billion, $15 billion, $20 billion. 22, 24, you know, we're at billions and billions of dollars. And the Q's as well, uh, 6.4 million shares yesterday. That was also almost 7%, $3.8 billion. But when you start adding these up as well, the, uh, these institutions, they don't normally lose money, so they know in advance of what's actually going on. So because the market's melting, I have the SPY and the QQQs today. So let's, uh, Go ahead and look at this. So last 30 days, these are the top 10 largest trades in the last 30 days, and you can see here coming back February 22nd to March 23rd. Now we always look back 30 days, and we saw all of this that was going on in here, but now we're below everything. We've come, we've pulled back, tested the prints, pulled back, now tested these moving averages. Then we had these consolidation of prints here in the last several days. And then move down below my 200 simple, 200 exponential, and this is just rocketing down. So there's 9 million, 5 million, 7.2. All of this is billions and billions of dollars. We're coming down to my 250 simple moving average at 640.56. We're very close to that, and we're already 18 minutes into the market open, and we're already down $5. So we can bounce as well. So if you're going to take trades, retracement trades, you've just got to be careful because bounces And we're bearish, that'll be some profit taking. And so just be careful of that. And we've got this momentum where the 4 and the 8 exponential are moving apart and we're following this here. So let's see where we can go. Probably $640. If we don't hold $640, we can probably come down $630 to $620 on that over the next few days. Now if we retrace, it would be up to the 4 exponential moving average around, um, $6.52. That still gives us, uh, $8 or $9 to get up here and then potentially up to this moving average here, my 200 simple, which is about $6.57, something like that. So the ATR on this is about $10 now. We've been averaging about $10 a day And so when we look at this from when, when we started breaking out of this back here, this is 677. So this is about 35 points that we've got in this break up and then back down here. So once this, this was kind of confirmed, yeah, so that's quite a bit. So let's go ahead and map this out so we can make money on both sides. We do have a bearish sort of bias at the moment, but we try not to trade without a bias. So what we have is If we break above a certain level, then we have a trade setup, and if we break below a specific level, then we have another trade setup. So for you intraday scalpers, that's the purpose of this video is without a bias, then you actually have a trading plan. So what we're going to do is we're going to be bullish above 644 on the SPY target 645.28. We have this pocket 646.38, 647.47. Then we've got 649.67 and 99. That's a double one here, or 32 cents apart. It's a double pivot and a cam that's there. 650.76, 651.86, 652.75 is this 5 million print. And it could be that they were collecting the dividend, the dollar something on that. So that'd be nice to have 5 million shares and collect like $1.80 on that. Uh, and usually with the dividend The stock would drop by the percent, by the dividend amount anyway, because you're collecting that. But we've clearly dropped quite a bit more. And then yeah, I've mapped it out to 655.15, 656.27, 656.84 is this 9 million, and 658.02 is the 7 million from Friday. So we'll see what actually happens there. So on the downside, we're going to be bearish below 641.87. So we've got this one right here, 641.99. We'll give it an extra eighth below. We'll see if we can— if we pull back, tag this, start moving back down again. So it'd be like an H sort of pattern. And then 641, 640, 638.02 is S2. 630, 653 Then we've got six, six thirty and six twenty six oh five. So let's see what actually happens here. We break below and we've got that momentum and we have this four and the eight running together. There's no reason to get out. Just like here on the daily, there was no reason to get out when we broke. Like if you were if you were trading here, not sure if you would have taken it there, but when you're breaking below. And staying below these prints, then there's no reason because we never closed, we never closed above the 4 exponential moving average. This one here did a little bit when this was the way that this looked when we were on this day without these extra candles here. These moving average, what's the top of this was actually retracement and pushing off the 8 exponential moving average, and that was still a good shorting opportunity And even to add to your position at that point because we're still below all of this and we had this this momentum and so anyway any of you that are still in that's great on that side let's go ahead and look at the QQQs and you notice that's been a theme I've been calling the SPY and the QQQs quite often especially when the market is melting you can trade definitely individual stocks I like to trade the market as a whole. And plus the SPY and the Q, the options are quite liquid on that, but the spreads are terrible. You notice that the— as we get the increased volatility, the, the bid and ask on the options are quite bad. But anyway, same thing here. We can see the massive prints from Friday, 1.9 million here at 585.99 and another almost 6 million here at 593.10. 594. So that is above my 200 simple moving average. This will be massive resistance here. And this is the same sort of theme, but you can see 8 million, 2, 2, 3, 1, whatever. And this was a massive distribution pattern here. And you can see overall, you can see overall that we're not making higher highs. This might have been for a second, but that actually just moved down. We're not making really higher highs in this, and we're just coming down. This down here is a 400 moving average, which is about 30 points below. We'll see what happens there. Okay, so let's map this out both sides. Bullish above 577. Let's get above this. We want this 576.68 to be support. Now, if you're watching this video, we might come We might come up here, pull back, and then get in again. Make sure that you have like at least, you know, 75 cents or a dollar that you can make, especially if you're, if you're trading options. So $577, target $578.59, $579.74, $580.90. You can see this here, $583.22, $583.92. Right here, $584.38, $585.53, and $585.99. I wound up stopping there. This, this, uh, $1.9 million, this is also the post-market here, and this is my 200 simple, 200 exponential right here. And so if we get back up there, this will be massive resistance, and we'll see if we can Turn back down. So you do have wild moves in in these markets as well. When we looked at COVID, the COVID crash, you would have like a ten or fifteen point move down, and then you would have like a ten point rally the next day back up to the four exponential moving average, and you could just short it again, and it would just move back down. This one's a little bit different because it's been volatile day to day. And then you don't have those massive, massive wild moves, but the retracements can be several dollars, and then it turn around. And you see that like the end of the day the other day where it rallied four or five points just to tank the next day on that. So we're going to be bullish below bearish below five seventy four seventy five. Let's get below this target five seventy two fifty. Then we've got 571.29 is S2, 570, 569.35 is this cam. Then we've got 567.50, 565, 560, 558.66. You can see these massive pockets down here on the downside, and S3 here is usually oversold, but the market's crashing anyway. But you've got from 558 All the way up to to about here to 575. So that's 15 points anyway on that on the downside. Okay, there you have it. Those are your two trade setups for today. So hopefully you're making money on these trade setups and check out our weekly dark pool report at mobiticktrading.com/weekly-report. First name, email address. And we send you a newsletter every Sunday. It went out yesterday with our trade setups. We look at what we did the previous week for trade setups. We analyze all of that and learn some things about the dark pools. This week we were learning about late prints like I had mentioned, and you get your trade setups for the following week. All right, happy trading everyone, and we'll see you this afternoon with our results video. Mobitick has partnered with TrendSpider to bring real-time institutional trades to your charts. Click the link in the description below for more details.
