Nice upside follow-through in Equities to kick off October expiration week, but breadth remains subpar and volume is around 15% under average given the holiday. The last hour has finally resulted in Advancing stocks surpassing Declining, but REITS and Utilities are the top gainers for today, along with Technology and Industrials on an Equal-weighted basis. Both Small and mid-cap issues are gradually playing catchup after early underperformance - Russell 2k is still lagging SPX today, +0.37% (IWM 0.61% ) vs. +0.61% for SPX, and the Ishares Russell 2k ETF is growing ever closer to the most meaningful area of upside resistance, which lies at 224. This marks the highs of the three-month Triangle from July and is expected to eventually give way to an upside breakout. At present, i expect IWM likely pushes higher from 222 up to 224 and might stall as US stock indices get up to resistance

Both Small caps and Transports getting a shot in the arm today as the Financials, Industrials and Discretionary performance is aiding Equal-weighted SPX much more than SPX and QQQ. More work needs to be done technically, but a push to new multi-day highs after recent consolidation certainly stands out as a positive. IWM 0.61%  here at 220.4 is showing the highest close of the month today, enabling this to likely push higher to test the more important area of resistance at 224-5.

TSLA 1.01%  down about 7% as its Robotaxi event, despite being quite impressive as a flashy event in showing the Cybercab, RoboVan, Humanoid robots, seemed to be light on specifics,, outside of detailing that the Cybercab would cost less than $30k. Technically, TSLA has been making good progress over the last six months as well as since early August, but today's early drop has caused TSLA to retrace a bit more than 50% of the rise from August. I view the stock as still quite attractive on an intermediate-term basis, but will need to stabilize. I feel that downside would be limited to 208. UBER and LYFT are both rising today as TSLA falls. Thus, no change in thinking here, but a better risk reward.. Reclaiming 232 is necessary to start to jumpstart this stock again back higher

Bank earnings have gotten off to a very good start, with JPM -0.49%  having beaten 3rd Q results and raised key metric in its 2024 guidance. WFC 3.53%  also beat expectations on profit as did BK 2.35% . Many fundamental analysts are calling JPM's net interest income of $23.4 b a "huge beat", even when mgt tempered expectations. BK monthly charts, shown here, exceeded all-time highs and have achieved a huge 2 decade breakout back to new all-time highs which happened back in July. Price is up at 75 and very stretched but could get to 78. BK is one where it would be better to buy weakness in the high $60's. However, entire Financial sector broke out earlier this week and bodes well for outperformance, which at 12.5% of SPX, is important as a tailwind for the market