ES Futures Daily Plan · Aug 03, 2026
Monday's question is whether the 45-point gap holds prior high 7541 as support or gets filled back into Friday's value.
ES · Sep '26 (ESU6) · data through 08:19 CT
Overnight 7543.5 – 7567.75 (24.25 pts) · last 7564.25 · volume 212,466
Gap +45 vs settle: modest against yesterday's 113.5-pt range · sitting above prior value · ON VPOC 7554.75
The line
Friday closed on its high and the reopen jumped straight above it, so today asks one thing: does the market accept prices above prior high 7541.00, or does it come back to repair the gap. The overnight built its own volume shelf above Friday's value area rather than spiking and fading, which is the more constructive of the two. Acceptance back beneath 7541.00 is what turns this from continuation into a failed breakout.
Levels
Working:
7567.75 · overnight high
7554.75 · overnight VPOC
7543.50 · overnight low
7541.00 · prior session high
7526.50 · prior POC
7469.75 · prior VAL
Background:
7601.75 · untested POC, Jul 16
7570.25 · Jul 13–14 VAL
7454.50 · Jul 29–30 VAH
7409.00 · Jul 29–30 POC
Yesterday
Friday was a trend day up dressed as a two-sided open. Price opened above Thursday's value, sold off hard into the first hour, and set the session low inside the first sixty minutes. That early break down to 7427.50 corrected the prior night's long inventory, and once the correction was paid for, the auction spent the rest of the day building value upward: the point of control migrated 40.50 points in the afternoon and the close came in at the top of the range.
The profile is bottom-heavy and thin at the top. Value sits well above the low, and the last two hours left a narrow shelf between 7513.75 and Friday's high with no time to develop. That is unfinished structure, not a completed auction, and it is why the market could leave it behind so easily on the reopen.
The delta picture matches. Heaviest net selling printed down at 7442.00, near the session low, and it was absorbed: price never came back to it. Heaviest net buying printed up near the high, initiative rather than responsive, with the final thirty minutes carrying the day's largest volume and its largest positive delta. Buyers paid up at the highs and were not punished for it.
Friday's plan called for an open above value and for an early trip back to the 7472.50 reference; both happened, the correction inside the first half hour. What that plan underweighted was how much the day would extend once the correction was done.
Overnight
The move is all at the reopen. Sunday's 17:00 CT bar came in roughly thirty points above Friday's settle and immediately traded a range that sat entirely above Friday's high, then the rest of the night is a slow staircase: small bars, small deltas, higher lows. Nothing in Asia or Europe attempted to fill the gap. The overnight low, set in the first hour of trade, is still the low twelve hours later.
Volume tells the same story as the shape. The night's heaviest thirty-minute bars are the reopen and the last ninety minutes into the European and US premarket hours, and those late bars carry positive delta with the high made just after 06:30 CT. Volume followed price higher rather than fading it, so the overnight VPOC settled above Friday's value area edge instead of leaning back on it.
Inventory into the open is one-sided long: every tick of the overnight traded above the settle reference. That is the day's main hazard. It does not argue against the direction, it argues that the first move off the open is as likely to be a rebalancing dip as a continuation.
Structure
The sequence over three weeks is a rotation down and then most of the way back. Mid-July value stacked in the 7570–7626 zone across the Jul 13–14 and Jul 15–16 balances, then broke: Jul 17 and Jul 20 sliced through, and the market rebuilt in the 7424–7460 area for three sessions, the longest-held balance of the run. A brief probe higher on Jul 21–22 failed. The lowest value of the period came Jul 29–30 around 7409.00, and that is where the auction turned.
Since then it has been a straight repair. Friday's session alone covered most of the ground back and rebuilt value at 7526.50, and the overnight has now placed price above every value area since Jul 22. The market remains inside the twenty-day composite value area, so this is repair within longer-term balance rather than a breakout from it.
Above, the first real structure is the Jul 13–14 balance beginning at 7570.25, and behind it the untested Jul 16 point of control at 7601.75, 37.50 points overhead. Below, the gap zone between the overnight low and Friday's high is empty of volume, and beneath that Friday's own point of control is the first genuine shelf.
What options price
No straddle pricing is available ahead of this open, so I size the day off structure and recent realized behavior instead. The twenty-day composite is wide and unbalanced, 154.25 points from edge to edge, with its heaviest volume up at 7592.00 and price currently sitting in the thin middle of it. Friday delivered a 113.50-point range on 1.42 million contracts, and the four sessions before it ran between 65 and 137 points. Against that, the untested 7601.75 sits 37.50 points above last price and Friday's point of control 37.75 below, so both edges of my map are inside a single ordinary session's reach. What would require an unusual day is a full retracement to the Jul 29–30 value area.
The read
I favor the overnight range holding and the auction continuing to work higher, with prior high 7541.00 as the line that defines it. The case is the character of the last two sessions: selling absorbed at Friday's low, initiative buying paid at Friday's high, and an overnight that built a volume shelf above prior value rather than spiking through and fading. That is acceptance.
The counterweight is inventory. Of 45 mornings that opened with one-sided overnight positioning, only about a quarter had unwound by the open, and roughly a third by thirty minutes after it. Most such mornings did not repair immediately, which argues for an early dip that finds buyers rather than a gap fill.
Shape of the day: an open near the overnight highs, a probe back toward the overnight VPOC or the gap edge in the first half hour, then the test of whether responsive buyers show up in the empty air above 7541.00. The tell is what happens on that first pullback. If it stalls at or above the overnight low and the initial balance builds off it, this favors continuation toward the Jul 13–14 value edge and the untested 7601.75 behind it. If the market instead spends thirty minutes below 7541.00, the gap becomes the day's magnet and Friday's point of control is the objective.
What would change the read
Thirty minutes of trade accepted below 7541.00 kills the continuation lean and turns Friday's point of control into the target. On the other side, a fast push through the overnight high that immediately fails back inside the night's range would mark that high as excess and put the day into rotation instead.
All levels are computed as of the stated cutoff. This brief is educational market commentary, not investment advice or a recommendation. It does not consider any reader's financial situation, objectives, or risk tolerance, and past patterns described here are not a guarantee of future results. Futures and options trading carries substantial risk of loss and is not suitable for every investor.