3:15 p.m. New York time

45-minutes before the closing bell. Closing of early today.

The S&P 500 futures rose during the session, reaching into the 5790s. Elliott Wave Theory: The rise is a subwave within the falling 5th wave that began on March 5.

9:35 a.m. New York time

What’s happening now? The S&P 500 E-mini futures fluctuated narrowly from the 5750s to the 5770s in overnight trading, dropping a bit further as the time for a major economic announcement approached. When the employment situation report was released an hour before the opening bell, the futures whipsawed down to the 5730s and up to the 5780s before retreating to the narrow range where it had spent most of the night.

What does it mean? Elliott Wave Theory sees the whipsaw as a subwave one or two degrees down from its parent wave, the downtrending 5th wave that began on March 5 from 5869.50. That 5th wave, in turn, is the final subwave of a falling C wave that began on February 19, from 6166.50.

The parent wave of both is a 4th-wave downward correction that began on December 16, 2024, from 6163.75

That’s a long, detailed way of saying that the futures have had a net downward tilt since mid-December, and that will be with us until the present falling 5th wave comes to an end.

At that point, the end of wave 5 is also the end of wave C and, most likely, the end of wave 4, which encompasses the entire downward tilt that began on December 16, 2024.

I hedged when I said it would “likely” be the end of the 4th wave. Most corrective waves are built from a single corrective pattern, a simple form. But some take a compound form, containing two or three corrective patterns. There’s no way to predict a compound correction. We know it after it is underway.

Simple or compound, the end of wave 4 will be followed by an uptrending 5th wave that will likely return the price to the 6160s and perhaps once higher.

Note the hedge on how high wave 5 might reach. Most 5th waves will move beyond the starting point of the previous 4th wave. But not all. Some 5th waves are truncated, falling short of the 4th-wave’s endpoint. And some will move further, beyond a level that seems reasonable — an extended 5th wave.

[S&P 500 E-mini futures at 3:15 p.m., 2-hour bars, with volume]

What is the alternative?  The hedges in the previous section layout the alternatives to come. At present, I see no ambiguities.

What does Elliott Wave Theory say? Here are the waves that underlie the morning’s analyses as they appeared on the chart.

Principal Analysis

• Falling wave C{-6} within falling wave 4{-5} continues.
• Falling wave 5{-7} is underway.
• When wave 5{-7} ends, it will also be the end of waves C{-6} and 4{-5}.
• Rising wave 5{-5} will begin, likely carrying the price to new heights.

Long-term Waves.

These are the waves currently in progress under my principal analysis. Each line on the list shows the wave number, with the subscript in curly brackets, the traditional degree name, the starting date, the starting price of the S&P 500 E-mini futures, and the direction of the wave.

• S&P 500 Index:
• 5{+3} Supercycle, 7/8/1932, 4.40 (up)
• 5{+2} Cycle, 12/9/1974, 60.96 (up)
• 5{+1} Primary, 3/6/2009, 666.79 (up)
• 5{0} Intermediate, 2/11/2016, 1810.10 (up)
• 3{-1} Minor, 3/23/2020, 2191.36 (up)
• 3{-2} Minute, 10/13/2022, 3491.58 (up)
• S&P 500 Futures
• 5{-3} Minuette, 4/18/2024, 4963.50 (up)
• 3{-4} Subminuette, 8/7/2024, 5182 (up)
• 4{-5} Micro, 12/16/2025, 6163.75 (down)
• C{-6} Submicro, 2/19/2025, 6166.50 (down)
• 5{-7} (no name), 3/5/2025, 5869.50 (down)

Reading the chart. Price movements — waves – – in Elliott Wave Theory analysis are labeled with numbers within trending waves and letters with corrective waves. The subscripts — numbers in curly brackets — designate the wave’s degree, which, in Elliott Wave analysis, means the relative position of a wave within the larger and smaller structures that make up the chart. R.N. Elliott, who in the 1930s developed the form of analysis that bears his name, viewed the chart as a complex structure of smaller waves nested within larger waves, which in turn are nested within still larger waves. In mathematics it’s called a fractal structure, where at every scale the pattern is similar to the others.

Learning and other resources. Elliott Wave analysis provides context, not prophecy. As the 20th century semanticist Alfred Korzybski put it in his book Science and Sanity (1933), “The map is not the territory … The only usefulness of a map depends on similarity of structure between the empirical world and the map.” And I would add, in the ever-changing markets, we can judge that similarity of structure only after the fact.

See the menu page Analytical Methods for a rundown on where to go for information on Elliott Wave analysis.

By Tim Bovee, Portland, Oregon, March 7, 2025

Disclaimer

Tim Bovee, Private Trader tracks the analysis and trades of a private trader for his own accounts. Nothing in this blog constitutes a recommendation to buy or sell stocks, options or any other financial instrument. The only purpose of this blog is to provide education and entertainment.

No trader is ever 100 percent successful in his or her trades. Trading in the stock and option markets is risky and uncertain. Each trader must make trading decisions for his or her own account, and take responsibility for the consequences.

License

All content on Tim Bovee, Private Trader by Timothy K. Bovee is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Based on a work at www.timbovee.com