Thanksgiving Week: High Risk Volatility Expected, ZM Earnings + Defensive Names

$RL $ZM $VSCO $PG $SPX $NDX

An unusually high risk of volatility is expected during the Thanksgiving holiday week due to many economic data squeezed into a shortened trading schedule.

This dense calendar resulted from earlier delays linked to the government shutdown.

Tuesday, November 25

• CPI (headline and core) - correction* this data is moved to December 18.

• PPI

• Retail Sales

Wednesday, November 26

• PCE and Core PCE (the Fed’s preferred inflation gauge)

• Plus the usual pre-holiday releases (durable goods, jobless claims, consumer sentiment, etc.

The compression of data might result in multiple challenges. Markets will have almost no time to fully absorb and price in one set of data before the next arrives. Trading liquidity is likely to thin out significantly as participants reduce risk ahead of the Thursday holiday closure.

Many institutions will operate with reduced staffing, limiting market-making capacity and the ability to absorb large orders smoothly.

Perhaps most importantly, these numbers will arrive just three weeks before the Federal Reserve’s December policy meeting. Any meaningful surprise—higher or lower than expected—could sharply shift expectations for the final rate decision of the year.

As we highlighted last Friday, markets experienced a sharp sell-off on Thursday following Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell’s hawkish comments during his post-FOMC press conference. This tempered outlook led traders to dramatically scale back expectations, pricing in just a 27% probability of a 25BPS cut at the December 9-10 meeting (CME FedWatch Tool).

The mood shifted abruptly on Friday when NY Fed President John Williams delivered more dovish remarks in a speech in Santiago, Chile. Williams acknowledged the softening labor market—pointing to the September unemployment rate of 4.4%, which he described as akin to pre-pandemic levels without overheating—and noted that upside risks to inflation have eased as tariff effects prove transitory. This prompted a quick repricing, with the odds of a December cut surging to around 70% by late Friday, per Fed funds futures.

Bond yields pulled back modestly, and stocks staged a partial recovery, though volume remained subdued heading into the long weekend.

What to Expect

The clustering of major economic releases, extremely tight reaction windows, and holiday-thinned liquidity together create a textbook setup for sharp gaps at the open and heightened intraday volatility. It will provide a great levels based day-trading.

Let’s get to SPX and NDX trading levels:

SPX

Resistance: 6,645 / 6,709

Support: 6,583 / 6,538

caption...

NDX

Resistance: 24,400 / 24, 779

Support: 24,032 / 23,964 / 23,750

Remember that sector we flagged last week? It outperformed the market on Friday. And the smart money is doubling down. We’re seeing that kind of a bullish flow that usually signals something big is brewing. We identified strong players from this sector and will share some charts, trade idea and option flow with you below.

We’re also going to look into ZM 0.00%↑ earnings flow and some defensive names for the portfolio balance.