Futures General Commentary - July 20, 2026

Date: 2026-07-20

URL: https://youtu.be/xbtW_0ipuos?si=VbuHVfJtGueITrhL

How are you?

I hope you had a nice weekend.

If you haven’t looked at the economic calendar for the week, it’s rather anemic.

We don’t have much data that could act as a catalyst for volatility injections this week.

There’s an absence, or vacuum, of any meaningful news today.

So that leaves us with what we have here.

We spent most of the time gyrating inside the TGIF 20% to 30% retracement range of last week’s range.

But we came up and just swept above this little high here.

We’re building in a premium opening relative to the Regular Trading Hours Opening Range Gap.

There is our previous settlement from Friday.

And if we were to open here…

What I’m watching for—I don’t have a very strong bias one way or the other.

So it’s more of a wait-and-see approach.

Watch the opening range.

Give it until 10:00.

And if nothing is obvious, then simply submit yourself to the 10:00 Silver Bullet, which is the first presented fair value gap aiming for relative equal lows or anything smooth where price hasn’t made them jagged.

These lows right here—I like them because they’re smooth.

We went sideways and then expanded away after hitting this bullish fair value gap.

So it rallied up and took out buy-side here and here on a shallow basis.

I’d like to see it leave it like that, come down during the opening range, clear out the liquidity, return to Friday’s settlement, and maybe even extend a little beyond it.

In here, you can see that even though this one went slightly lower…

So there’s sell-side resting below here.

It’s a minor sell-side liquidity pool.

I’d like to see price come down here, fully reprice back to Friday’s settlement price, and overshoot it slightly if necessary.

It doesn’t really need to, but if it does, that would be nice to see—then reject.

Then whatever fair value gap forms in the wake of that, we can use it and interpret it as a potential bullish inversion fair value gap to make a much more meaningful run above here.

And again, this is all assuming that this high remains intact.

There’s nothing stating that this is going to happen.

It’s simply something I’d like to see left in the price action.

That way, we’re forecasting and predicting the future—that type of stuff, you know, the mumbo-jumbo stuff.

Then, if price can gravitate back toward that hourly buy-side imbalance, sell-side inefficiency from last Wednesday at noon Eastern Time, and get above it, these relative equal highs over here…

I’ve just got a feeling about them, folks.

Up here, see that? That's just a little too smooth for my liking.

In an ideal scenario, I’d like to see this become this week’s draw on liquidity.

Now, I don’t have to be right about that.

But because we have no news, I’m simply looking at what could potentially materialize.

I’d like to see something like this:

Come down here, hit that, and then work toward going up there.

It’s essentially a Market Maker Buy Model.

Smart Money Reversal accumulation, low-risk buy accumulation, and then whatever drops down into here could become the first stage of accumulation.

Then use this as a reclaimed bullish fair value gap.

Overseas, in the Middle East, obviously we have crude oil.

Take a look at this.

Go back to the daily chart.

Remember, I gave you this gap in here.

We went right down into it, closed it perfectly, rallied above it, and then came back down into the buy-side imbalance, sell-side inefficiency.

Okay, a smaller breaker.

Look at it on the 4-hour or 1-hour chart, and you’ll see a bullish breaker there confirming it.

Then price rallies and trades right into this little inefficiency.

We were able to find our way up into this.

And if we can get above it—okay, if we can get above that—then do you see these two highs right here?

That’s a little too clean for me.

And obviously, over here as well.

So if things start to heat up and become a little more violent, as I stated months ago—for instance, let’s just say they drop a tactical nuke.

It doesn’t have to be a large nuke, just a tactical nuke.

This is going straight up above $200 a barrel.

So these two levels here are event-driven, based on the escalation between the countries that are at odds with one another.

This area in here—volume imbalance here, volume imbalance there.

So we have a bullish suspension block.

I’d like to see it make an attempt to trade down into that area and just bump below this low and that low right there.

It doesn’t need to come all the way back down.

I’d actually prefer that it didn’t.

But if things get really hot, it doesn’t need to do that at all.

It could simply start ripping higher.

We have this here.

Let’s call it a volume imbalance, suspension block, hybrid-type formation.

If we get above that, it should act as an inversion PD Array.

Its original utilization is sell-side delivery, meaning it was created by movement going lower.

So in a bearish market, it would act as a premium array, as you can see it do here and then here.

And then down we went.

If the market can find its footing above this, we want to see it act as a discount array.

And once we get outside of it, we would not want to see the bodies trading in the lower half here.

Then we would want to see price begin moving higher.

Okay, so nothing in here warrants lower prices in crude oil.

We’re going into a seasonal tendency where all the energies usually begin moving higher around the first week of July and continue into October.

And you might think October should be when energy prices begin rising because of seasonal supply-and-demand factors.

Because in commodities, there are real supply-and-demand factors.

Stocks and futures and things like that don’t really have a supply-and-demand factor.

It’s simply the pursuit of finding someone who will pay more than you did.

That’s all it is.

It’s the hot-potato scenario.

But crude oil is a commodity that is actually used.

It’s the lifeblood of most things in the industrial complex.

It is required.

For example, you heat your home.

I use propane.

If you don’t use propane, you may use natural gas.

Okay, so it’s one or the other.

Either way, around the first week of July, all the large companies you get your fuel from have to build their supply.

I have propane delivered twice a month during the winter.

In the summer, it’s more like once every six weeks.

But they still have to maintain enough supply to meet your demand.

So they build up their stockpiles by buying energy products like heating oil, unleaded gasoline, and natural gas.

Those prices tend to rise from the first week of July going into October.

Now, in October, the general public might think, “Okay, now it’s probably a good time to buy because it’s going to get cold.”

No.

Large conglomerates have to buy that supply before the cold months arrive.

So they’re buying it at what are technically considered lower prices.

Go back through history, and you’ll see that prices generally tend to rise.

Not all the time.

Recently, we’ve had the effects of military tensions and other factors.

And you can see it over here on the left-hand side.

You probably already noticed it on your chart:

“Wait a minute. He said the first week of July usually goes up.”

Yeah.

See this?

Then we simply drifted lower.

We weren’t at war then, okay?

We weren’t doing those types of things.

There was some saber-rattling and whatnot.

But this year, we moved into that scenario, and then price rallied.

So we have a seasonal tendency, and you can see it here.

There’s the first week of July, and we’ve rallied since then.

Okay, if I scroll back and give you another perspective, here’s another July.

The first week is right there.

It creates a short-term high and then starts dropping into October.

So there are two instances where that seasonal tendency did not materialize in the price action.

But when it doesn’t materialize, that’s actually bearish.

In other words, if price cannot rally when it should seasonally be moving higher, that’s a very strong indication that it’s likely to continue lower—unless some kind of event occurs, like what we’ve just seen this year.

Here’s another previous year.

The first week of July is right in here.

Price rallies going into the end of September, rolls into October, and there’s your high.

Okay, that’s a classic depiction.

They’ll say, “Oh, seasonal tendencies don’t work.”

Well, it’s a tool, okay?

It’s like this:

Wherever you are in the world, during the coolest months of your year, would you expect extreme heat?

No, because seasonally it isn’t expected.

For instance, here on the East Coast of the United States, we don’t expect to see snow in July.

Something would be significantly wrong if we were getting a blizzard and snowfall in Maryland in July.

There’s definitely something wrong.

Vice versa, we don’t expect a very hot and humid day in January where I live.

So there are seasonal tendencies.

Now, sometimes in the spring, like in April, we’ve had snow showers, snowstorms, and even a blizzard before.

So some things can occur that are contrary to the seasonal tendency.

But they’re so far-fetched—so unlikely to happen—that the probability is insignificant.

It’s better to expect that the extreme won’t occur during a seasonal tendency than to assume that it will.

I’ll scroll back a little more and see if there’s another one.

Here’s one.

The first week of July is right here, and we trade lower into October.

So the seasonal tendency did not materialize that year, and it came on the heels of this large run-up during the COVID period.

Okay, here we are at the first of July.

We trade lower into August, and then we rally into October.

So there was a little bit of deferment there.

It didn’t take off quite as quickly.

And going back another year, this is when crude oil had just come out of what we’ll call zero.

It was essentially $0 per barrel, and then it traded below that—to around negative $40.

So the drillers, the companies extracting oil from the ground, were actually paying people to come and take it away.

Now imagine that.

Imagine going to a grocery store and the store saying, “Look, we’ll pay you to take all this food off the shelves because we have too much of it, more is coming in, and we simply can’t handle it.”

That’s the equivalent of it.

Because of that event, the seasonal tendencies became destabilized.

Nobody knew what to do.

Nobody knew.

In fact, I said the same thing:

“I don’t know for certain what it’s going to do because it did this.”

But back here, I was calling for $13 and $11 per barrel.

Nobody could have seen this coming.

I didn’t see it coming.

But because of that, it was a shell shock to everyone.

And the only thing I said was:

“I wouldn’t be surprised if they eventually worked us back up into these highs here and then gravitated back toward $100 per barrel, because they want it there.”

That’s where they want it.

And we went above $100.

Now we’re just talking about history.

But I want to preface this by saying that these seasonal tendencies tend to align when other factors are present.

We have a wartime scenario, and we have the two major straits in that region through which a large percentage of global oil production, transportation, and shipping passes.

Both of those waterways act as major arteries—the Strait of Hormuz and the other one.

But it’s like putting a death grip on delivery.

That’s going to cause prices to rise.

I don’t think we’re out of the woods in terms of the impact.

I think this entire run-up and drop may be the beginning of another significant bull market.

And it may be one of those bull markets where price gaps so far ahead that either you’re already in, or you miss most of the safer entry.

I don’t really want to use the word “safe” in that context, but it’s a very event-driven market right now.

Personally, I don’t have the 20-year-old nerve to trade it with any meaningful size.

The volatility has already caused the options to become overvalued.

They’re expensive.

So I’m watching it because I think it’s likely to start moving higher again.

It traded into our level here and found support.

Now we’ve come back up into this area.

So if this turns into an inversion, remember, it was created with sell-side delivery.

We’re trading up into it here.

If the market is bearish, you would expect it to start falling out of bed from this area.

I don’t think that’s what’s happening right now.

I could be wrong.

It could humble me in front of all of you and say, “Nope, we’re going lower.”

Okay.

But I’m waiting to see whether price trades out of it, comes back down, and uses it as a stepping stone—a rung on the ladder—to carry us up into this one.

Then we’ll see whether this one turns into an inversion fair value gap.

Gold, real quick.

Gold has that sell-side liquidity.

I think we’re probably going to sweep it.

We hit our other targets in here, and this area is a little too smooth.

There’s nothing terribly exciting yet that makes me want to go long.

If we really lose ground over here, then long, long, long term—long term.

But I’m not going to push that narrative right now.

I’m not as strong in that regard as I am in believing that Bitcoin is going to zero.