The SPY Framework: A User’s Guide

What These Posts Are

Most market commentary tells you what just happened.

These do something different. Each issue names the levels that matter, states what I’d do at them, and time-stamps the call.

Two weeks later, the next issue grades it.

That’s the whole point. Anyone can call a market in hindsight. Naming levels in advance and publishing the result two weeks later is a different practice.

Why SPY

SPY is the locomotive. Everything else is a car on the train.

It doesn’t matter whether you trade SPY directly, individual equities, sector ETFs, or swing positions held overnight — the locomotive sets the direction, the speed, and the conditions under which your trade either works or grinds against you.

Read SPY first. Everything else follows.

Where These Posts Come From

These are not written on Sunday night by reviewing the prior two weeks in retrospect.

Each issue is built on real-time reads recorded during the trading day. When the tape does something worth capturing — a level holding, a level failing, buyers absorbing into weakness — the recorder goes on and the read gets spoken aloud while it’s still forming. Some of those reads lead to trades. Most don’t. The point isn’t the trades. It’s the read, preserved in the moment it was made rather than reconstructed after the fact.

Any single session is noise. The read comes from what repeats across ten of them.

Real-time observation cannot be backdated. The audit trail is what makes that visible.

What Each Issue Contains

Every issue follows the same order:

Last time. The previous issue’s levels, graded. They held or they didn’t.
Where we are. The market’s current position, stated plainly.
The level above. The price that matters on the upside, and what I’d do there.
The level below. The price that matters on the downside, and what it would tell me.
Posture. Whether this is a market to press, to fade, or to leave alone.
The chart. One clean chart with the levels marked.

The structure is identical issue to issue. The content shifts with the tape. The audit trail accumulates.

How to Use These Posts

This is not a signal service.

These posts name the levels and the posture — not the trade. No entries, no stops, no sizing. What you get is where the decisions happen and which way I’m leaning, so you can align your own positions with what SPY is actually doing.

Read the issue to know the terrain. Trade your own framework against it, or stay out if the market isn’t paying your style.

What Comes Next

The bi-weekly demonstrates the read. The Aspen Discretionary Service is what the read produces in trade form — specific SPY, equity and ETF setups aligned with the same structural work behind these posts, with entries, stops, sizing, and the full level set.

The bi-weekly is free. The audit trail is public.

If the levels land where the tape actually goes, issue after issue — the service does the rest of the work.

If they don’t, you’ll see that too.

That’s the trade.