Nasdaq Futures Weekly Patterns: How Last Week Shapes This Week, Day by Day

Nasdaq futures weekly patterns are the difference between a trader who opens the chart on Monday with a plan and one who reacts to whatever the first candle does. NQ does not reset on Monday. It carries last week's range, last week's news and the positioning that news created into the new week. A Monday after a Fed hike trades nothing like a Monday after a quiet expiry. This is how we read the weekly and monthly picture, what last week (September 14–18, 2026) left on the chart, and what that usually means for each day of the week that follows.

What "weekly and monthly patterns" actually mean

A weekly candle on NQ is five sessions of order flow compressed into one bar: where the week opened, its high and low, and where it closed relative to that range. The monthly candle is the same idea over roughly 21 sessions. Neither is a signal on its own. What they give you is context:

• Structure. The weekly high and low are the two levels the largest participants are measured against. Most intraday sweeps on NQ are runs at last week's high or low, not at some intraday pivot.
• Bias. A weekly close in the top third of its range after a wide week says buyers finished in control; a close in the bottom third says the opposite. The monthly close does the same job for swing positions and for the funds that rebalance around it.
• Rhythm. Weeks alternate. An expansion week (wide range, trend) is usually followed by a contraction week (narrow range, chop inside the prior range) or a retest week (a probe of one extreme, then reversal). Two expansion weeks in the same direction in a row happen, but they are the minority.

The monthly pattern that matters most for NQ is the option-expiry cycle: the third Friday (monthly opex) tends to pin price into large strikes during the week before, and the week after opex is often when a new directional move starts, because the hedging that held price in place is gone. Quarterly expiry (March, June, September, December) amplifies this; the September contract roll adds a second reason for odd volume in the middle of the month.

What last week left on the chart (September 14–18, 2026)

Last week was a news-driven expansion week. The Federal Reserve raised rates by 25 basis points to 3.75%–4.00%, its first hike in three years, and signalled more could follow. The 10-year Treasury yield pushed above 5% for the first time since 2007. The reaction sequence was textbook. Price sold off into and through the decision. Thursday brought a rebound of about 1.7% on the Nasdaq once oil fell and yields backed off. Nasdaq futures finished the week with a gain while the Dow and S&P 500 posted losses (CNBC's week coverage). It was also quarterly expiry week, so the Friday close carried the opex pin on top of the Fed move.

Three things carry into this week from that:

1. The Thursday low is the level. A V-shaped reversal after a scheduled event leaves a low that the market will test. If it holds, last week's rebound was accumulation; if it breaks on a close, the rebound was a squeeze and the Fed-driven trend resumes.
2. Divergence between the indices. NQ up, ES and YM down means the bid was concentrated in the largest tech names. That kind of narrow leadership tends to either broaden (ES catches up, everything grinds higher) or fail (NQ catches down). Watch whether ES reclaims its weekly midpoint early in the week.
3. Post-opex freedom. With the quarterly expiry behind us, the pinning at the big strikes is gone. The first two sessions after a quarterly opex frequently set the direction for the next two to three weeks.

How NQ usually trades each day of the week

These are tendencies, not rules. We measured them on our own session logs across about a year and a half of NQ trading. They shift with the calendar. Check them against your own data.

Monday — the positioning day. Range tends to be the narrowest of the week; the market decides whether last week's close was fair. After an expansion week like last week, Monday usually spends the first two hours inside Friday's range and then makes one probe at either the Thursday low or Friday's high. The mistake is trading the probe as a breakout. Mondays after a quarterly opex are the exception: they are often the first real directional day.

Tuesday — the first true move. The Tuesday high or low of the week is, more often than any other day, the high or low of the whole week. If Monday probed lower and held, Tuesday is when the upside expansion typically starts, and vice versa. Earnings from large index components land after the close on Tuesdays and Wednesdays in reporting weeks, which adds a second reason for a directional close.

Wednesday — the midpoint check. Wednesday is where the weekly range is usually defined on both sides. If Tuesday expanded up, Wednesday often retraces to the weekly midpoint and either holds it (trend week) or fails it (range week). Scheduled Fed communication and weekly oil inventories land here, so the 10:30 am ET and 2:00 pm ET windows carry more volatility than the rest of the day.

Thursday — the data day. Weekly jobless claims are every Thursday at 8:30 am ET; in the last week of a month, GDP revisions and the PCE preview cluster around it. Thursdays produce the most trend days when the data confirms the week's direction and the most violent reversals when it does not. Last week's V-bottom was a Thursday for that reason.

Friday — the positioning unwind. Range contracts after the first ninety minutes as traders square positions into the weekly close; the exception is monthly opex Friday, when price pins to a strike and then can move sharply in the last hour. The Friday close relative to the weekly midpoint is your first read on the following Monday.

Reading this week (September 21–25) from that

Put the calendar on top of the day-of-week pattern and this week reads like this:

• Monday is post-quarterly-opex and post-Fed. Expect a directional session rather than the usual narrow one, and treat a close above Friday's high or below Thursday's low as the week's first signal.
• Tuesday carries a large semiconductor earnings report after the close (Micron is the one to watch on the calendar). The Tuesday session itself tends to be an inside day ahead of it; the reaction shows up in Wednesday's globex session and the 9:30 open.
• Thursday brings GDP, jobless claims and the core PCE inputs; Friday brings the PCE price index, personal income and spending, and consumer sentiment. With the Fed having just moved on inflation, PCE is this week's single most important print. Reduce size into 8:30 am ET Friday and let the first fifteen minutes finish before reading structure (BEA release schedule).

The base case from last week's candle is a retest week: a probe of the Thursday low early, a hold, then a push at last week's high into the PCE print. The alternate case is a failure of the Thursday low on a daily close, in which case the Fed-driven trend is back and every bounce is a lower high. You do not need to guess which; you need to know the two levels and what a close through each of them means.

Earnings and high-impact news: the two things that override the weekday pattern

Day-of-week tendencies assume a normal week. Two things suspend them:

• High-impact scheduled news — FOMC, CPI, NFP, PCE. The pattern collapses into "before the print, inside the range; after the print, expansion." We cover the exact timings and how the first fifteen minutes behave in trading NQ around high-impact news.
• Mega-cap earnings. When Apple, Microsoft, Nvidia, Amazon, Alphabet or Meta report, NQ's overnight session does the work and the regular session often just retests the overnight range. Treat the day after a mega-cap report like a news day, not a Tuesday or Wednesday.

Everything else (Fed speakers, mid-tier data, geopolitical headlines) tends to produce a spike and a return to the pattern within the hour, the engineered move we describe in how institutions move price.

A weekly routine that uses all of this

1. Sunday evening: mark last week's high, low and close, the weekly midpoint, and the monthly high and low. Note where opex and the roll sit this month.
2. Sunday evening: list the week's scheduled events by day with times in ET; mark which days the weekday pattern does not apply.
3. Each morning: ask what yesterday's close did to the weekly range (expanded it, held inside it, or reversed from an extreme) and which of the two key levels is closer.
4. Each session: trade the probe-and-hold or the break-and-retest at those levels, at the times of day that matter, and read the candle closes that confirm them.
5. Friday close: log where the week closed in its range. That single note is your Monday bias.

Where MyTradingBuddy fits

MyTradingBuddy reads the chart you have open across the weekly, daily, 4-hour and intraday timeframes at once. It marks the levels that matter — last week's extremes, the midpoint, the untested lows — and names the close that would invalidate the current read. It does not predict the week; it makes sure the two levels and the calendar are in front of you before the first candle. The trial is three days for $14.07: try it on this week's chart.

Related reading

• Best times to trade NQ: a session-by-session guide
• Reading NQ by the clock: candle closes and order flow
• Early signs a trend is about to shift

Nothing here is financial advice. Weekly patterns are tendencies, not a forecast. Trading involves risk.