3:30 p.m. New York time
Half an hour before the closing bell. The event of the day was Apple’s new-stuff presentation. AAPL dropped swiftly when the event came to an end. AAPL is 3rd in market cap within the S&P 500, but the AAPL response was small enough that I saw no spillover to the index.
Two tables showing AAPL and the S&P 500 futures, each with 5-minute bars, taken minutes after the end of the event. It vividly shows the specificity of the response to Apple’s event: As if the charts were saying, “AAPL, this is on you. The rest of us? Not our problem.”


Left: AAPL 5-minute bars Right: S&P 500 futures 5-minute bars
S&P 500 futures. Elliott Wave Theory clearly illustrates that the futures continued to show some ambiguity, a usual occurence when a movement is fishing for its end. Overnight the corrective pattern within downtrending wave 5 peaked at 6523.0 and then moved a bit lower.
The peak might have been the end of the correction, or not. If the price moves above the overnight peak, the correction is still underway. If it continues to drop, the further it goes the more likely it is that the correction has ended.
9:35 a.m. New York time.
What’s happening now. The S&P 500 E-mini futures zigzagged from slightly above 6500 to the 6520s and then back again, a little bit lower.
What does it mean? Smaller to larger. Elliott Wave Theory analysis sees the downtrending 5th wave that began on September 5 continuing and working through an upward correction. The 5th wave itself is the final subwave within declining wave C, which began on August 28, the final subwave within a 4th-wave downward correction that began on August 14.

[S&P 500 E-mini futures at 3:30 p.m., 70-minute bars, with volume]
Waves Now Underway
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)
- 1{-2} Minute, 7/31/2025, 6468.50 (down)
- S&P 500 Futures
- 1{-3} Minuette, 10/13/2022, 4603 (up)
- 1{-4} Subminuette, 4/7/2025, 4832 (up)
- 3{-5} Micro, 4/21/2025, 5127.25 (up)
- 5{-6} Submicro, 8/1/2025, 6249.50 (up)
- 1{-7} Minuscule, 8/1/2025, 6349.50 (up)
- 3{-8} (unnamed), 8/5/2025, 6313.25 (up)
- 4{-9} (unnamed), 8/14/2025, 6508.75 (down)
- C{-10} (unnamed), 8/28/2025, 6523 (down)
- 5{-11} (unnamed), 9/5/2025, 6541.75 (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, September 9, 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.
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 work at www.timbovee.com









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