Why I Mark My $SPY Levels on ES Futures (Never on $SPY)

Your $SPY chart is lying to you by omission.

Not about the price. The price is fine. It is lying about what happened while you were asleep. $SPY trades six and a half hours a day. The market does not. And the levels that matter most tomorrow morning were built overnight, on a chart most stock traders never open.

That chart is ES, the E-mini S&P 500 future. And once I started marking my levels there instead of on $SPY, my premarket prep got sharper in a week than it had in a year.

If you trade $SPY and you are not using ES futures levels for $SPY trading yet, this post will change your mornings.

The problem with marking levels on $SPY

$SPY opens at 9:30 AM Eastern and closes at 4:00 PM. That is six and a half hours of price action.

ES futures trade nearly 24 hours a day, Sunday evening through Friday afternoon. That is the rest of the story.

Here is why that gap matters. Some of the most violent moves of the week happen overnight: Asia opens, Europe opens, headlines drop at 2 AM, futures spike or dump while $SPY holders are dreaming. When $SPY opens the next morning, it gaps to wherever ES already went.

If you only mark levels on the $SPY chart, you are marking levels on a chart with holes in it. You see the gap, but you do not see the path price took to get there. You do not see the swing high that formed at 3 AM. You do not see the low that got swept at 5 AM and reclaimed by 7 AM.

Those are real levels with real orders around them. And you are blind to every one of them.

Where the real liquidity pools form

Liquidity does not care about market hours. Stops cluster below obvious lows and above obvious highs no matter what time it is.

Overnight, ES is thinner. Fewer participants, wider swings, cleaner extremes. That thinness is exactly why the overnight highs and lows become magnets at the open. My full breakdown of what liquidity sweeps are explains the mechanics, but the short version is this: stops rest at obvious levels, price hunts them, and the hunt does not pause for the closing bell.

The big players, the ones actually moving size, watch futures. They are positioning overnight while retail is asleep. By the time $SPY opens, the map is already drawn. ES is the map.

So when I mark a swing high, I want the true swing high. Not the $SPY version with the overnight move cut out of it. The ES version, with everything included.

What I mark on ES every morning

My premarket routine has not changed in years, and it starts on the ES chart. Here is the exact list.

Prior day high and low on ES. Not the $SPY high and low. The ES high and low from the full session, including the overnight portion. These are the levels the whole world is watching.

Overnight high and low. The extremes printed during the globex session, roughly 6 PM to 9:30 AM Eastern. These are my first levels of the day, every day, no exceptions.

Clear swing highs and lows. The obvious turning points from the last few sessions on ES. If a level is clear on the futures chart, it is clear to everyone with size.

The 4H structure. I mark the bigger swing points on the 4H ES chart so I know whether the intraday levels are trading into support or resistance from the higher timeframe.

That is the whole list. Four things. It takes me about ten minutes, and it is the foundation of my premarket routine. Everything I trade that day hangs off these levels.

CME Group's equity futures page has the contract specs and trading hours if you want the official details on ES.

The divide-by-10 translation

Here is the part that makes this stupidly practical.

ES trades at roughly ten times the price of $SPY. So an ES level of 6,700 maps to roughly $670 on $SPY. An ES level of 5,950 maps to roughly $595.

My rule. Take the ES level, divide by ten, and you have your $SPY level within a few cents. It is not exact to the penny, futures and the ETF have their own microstructure, but it is close enough to plan entries, stops, and targets.

In practice, here is what my morning looks like. I mark 6,720 as the overnight high on ES. I write down $672 as the corresponding $SPY level. When $SPY opens and pushes toward $672, I already know what is waiting there, because I watched ES build that level at 4 in the morning.

No guessing. No surprise resistance. I saw it form.

One caution: always sanity check the translation against the actual $SPY open. On most days the mapping is clean. On wild gap days, verify before you trust it. The futures lead, but the ETF is what you are actually trading.

Want to watch me trade this live? I call these setups out in real time every morning inside the free Bulls Corner Discord. Get in free here, just drop your email and you're inside.

NQ is the same trick for $QQQ

Everything I just said about ES and $SPY applies to NQ and $QQQ.

NQ is the E-mini Nasdaq-100 future. It trades the same nearly 24-hour session. It prints the same overnight highs and lows. And the same translation trick works: NQ levels map to $QQQ levels the same way ES maps to $SPY.

I mark my $QQQ levels on NQ every morning, same list: prior day high and low, overnight high and low, clear swings, 4H structure. When I am deciding between trading $SPY or $QQQ on a given morning, having both futures charts marked makes the decision obvious. One of them almost always has the cleaner map.

My morning order of operations

So the full sequence, start to finish:

First, open ES and NQ. Mark the prior day high and low, the overnight high and low, and the obvious swings. Translate the key ones to $SPY and $QQQ prices.

Second, compare. Which ticker has cleaner levels? Which one has price sitting near a level that matters? That is usually the one I trade.

Third, build the plan around those levels. This is where my levels like the previous day high and low come in, except now I am marking the true versions from futures, not the cropped versions from the ETF chart.

Ten minutes. Every morning. It is the highest return on time in my entire trading business.

Stop trading half the chart

The market does not sleep, and neither do the levels that matter. $SPY shows you six and a half hours. ES shows you the whole day.

Mark your levels where the real action happens. Translate them to the ticker you trade. Walk into the open already knowing where the liquidity sits.

That is the edge. It has been sitting there the whole time, one chart away.

If you want to see this live instead of reading about it, I trade $SPY and $QQQ 0DTEs every morning and call every step out loud. The free Discord is where it happens, join free.

And if you want the whole thing, every setup, every alert, plus my full course: the 7-day free trial gets you inside Premium free for a week.

FAQ

Why mark levels on ES futures instead of $SPY?

$SPY only trades 6.5 hours a day while ES futures trade nearly 24 hours. The overnight session builds real swing highs, lows, and liquidity pools that the $SPY chart never shows. Marking on ES gives you the complete map instead of a cropped version.

How do you convert ES levels to $SPY levels?

Divide the ES price by ten. ES at 6,700 maps to roughly $670 on $SPY. It is not exact to the penny, but it is close enough to plan entries, stops, and targets. Always sanity check against the actual $SPY open on big gap days.

Do you trade the futures themselves?

No. I trade $SPY and $QQQ 0DTE options. I use ES and NQ purely as charting tools for marking levels, then I execute on the ETFs. The futures show me the map, the options are how I trade it.

Does this work for $QQQ too?

Yes. NQ, the E-mini Nasdaq-100 future, is the equivalent tool for $QQQ. Same nearly 24-hour session, same overnight levels, same translation approach. I mark both every morning and trade whichever ticker has the cleaner setup.

Risk note: everything on this blog is educational content from my own trading experience, not financial advice. Trading options involves substantial risk of loss.