Monday Takeaways: We’re in Correction Territory… Here’s What’s Coming Next

Shah Gilani|March 17, 2025

Market corrections aren’t rare.

But the speed of this one is.

The S&P 500 dropped more than 10% from its peak in just 16 trading days.

That descent matches the pace of the 2018 correction and is only surpassed by the 2020 COVID-19 crash.

No wonder folks are in a tizzy.

I won’t sugarcoat it for you and pretend that everything is all sunshine and rainbows.

Real technical damage was done to the markets in the past few weeks.

And I don’t believe the selling is over.

But unlike the 2020 crash, we can get in front of this one.

Today’s analysis takes you through my current thought process, support and resistance levels, as well as what I expect from the Fed this week.

Click on the thumbail below to get my take on what’s moving your money… NOW.

Transcript

Hey, everybody.

Shah Gilani here with your Monday Takeaways.

It’s just before the market’s about to open here, and the futures are pretty flat.

But the takeaway from last week, people, is there’s trouble ahead.

We were looking for a bounce. We got a bounce on Friday. But the markets are really just bouncing off six-month lows.

As far as the major indexes, the S&P 500 was in correction territory on Thursday, down more than 10%. Maybe that’s why we got a bounce on Friday.

We saw the same thing with the Nasdaq 100.

When I talk about the Nasdaq 100, I’m talking about the one hundred largest market capitalization stocks listed on the NASDAQ.

You’ve got the Nasdaq Composite Index, which consists of all the stocks listed on the NASDAQ. Then you have the Nasdaq 100 – the hundred biggest stocks within the Nasdaq Composite Index.

The Nasdaq 100 is really about tech.

It’s the one hundred largest non-financial market cap stocks. So, no banks.

It’s pretty much a tech barometer.

And guess what? It’s pretty ugly.

So, let me pull up a chart for you guys because you have to see what we’re looking at when we’re talking about the charts.

I know many of you asked in several emails if I could please point out where we are relative to support and resistance, what I see as far for the benchmarks, how low they could go, and what would move them.

So that’s what I’m gonna give you today.

Let me pull up the S&P 500, also known as SPX.

This is the S&P 500 Index.

It closed Friday up 2.13%. But it’s down four weeks in a row, in spite of the nice bump.

We’re testing the six-month lows right here.

Now, the interesting thing is we’re 1.8% below the 200-day moving average.

The 200-day moving average for the S&P 500 is $5,740.

We’re at $5,638 this morning.

So it’s got almost 2% to get back up just to its 200-day moving average. That’s gonna be a problem.

The actual high up here for the S&P 500, and I go by intraday highs when I’m talking about highs, came on February 19, 2025.

We were down, as of Friday, 8.3% from that high. But the day before, we were actually down 10.43%. So, we hit a correction on Thursday. Friday morning, we saw a bounce.

And I think it’s a technical bounce off of the lows because you had a 10% correction.

Is it time to buy the dip at 10%?

Let’s see if we can get some support in here.

You saw the buying on Friday. There wasn’t a lot of selling.

That’s why we went up so precipitously. The tech names got a little bit of a bid, and we had a nice move in the S&P 500.

So, yeah, not too bad. But is it sustainable?

Again, futures are pretty flat this morning.

Anything goes this week.

So that’s a worrisome thing for me. We could test the lows again.

The low intraday is $5,504 here (Thursday last week).

So, there’s some support here at the low.

This low ($5,504) is 134 points below where we closed on Friday. 134 points is 2.4%.

So, we would have to give back everything that the market did on Friday to get right back to that very tentative support low from Thursday.

If we break through that, we have minor support at $5,400.

The next support is down at $5,200. That’s a lot of white space. So, the market could slip precipitously. That’s what I’m worried about.

If we don’t catch some bids this week and have an up week…if we have another down week, then things are going to break.

If we can go sideways and start to consolidate here, then there’s hope.

So, that’s the S&P 500.

As far as the Nasdaq Composite Index, it looks even worse.

The Nasdaq Composite, from its high on February 19 to its low on Thursday, was down 13.79%.

Again, the S&P 500, at its lows, was in correction territory, down 10.34%.

The Nasdaq 100 was down 13.79%.

Now, it had that nice bounce on Friday, up 2.4%-2.5%. But, it was down for the week.

So, once again, where are we?

The 200-day moving average is way up here ($20,266).

We had a low at $19,152 on Thursday.

Now we could get back down and test that in a heartbeat.

What’s below that?

The next real support isn’t until $18,450 – $18,500 way down here.

Maybe we could see some support in there. Let’s hope we do. Otherwise, we’re heading lower.

So what’s gonna happen this week to arrest this ugly slide?

Well, certainly nothing that came out of the treasury over the weekend, because Scott Bessent said, “You know, corrections happen. We’re not worried about it.”

In other words, there isn’t going to be a Trump put. So nothing is coming out of there.

Nothing is going to come out of the Fed meeting this week.

I think it’s gonna be a nonstarter for the markets.

They’re just gonna exhale and go, “Okay, at least they didn’t say anything really bad.”

But they’re not going to say anything so positive that investors will start running out and buying a lot of these companies that are on sale.

The only thing I think could move the markets this week is maybe Jensen Huang from NVIDIA speaks at a conference on Wednesday.

If he starts talking up NVIDIA’s book and how great AI is and how big their back orders are, maybe he can put a bid under NVIDIA stock, which it needs because it’s been all over the place.

Again, this is the most widely held stock in the world. Been absolutely beaten up.

Caught a nice bid on Friday. And, you know, last couple days of the week, it did. There were some buying in there. It looked like bargain buying, and that’s fine.

So whatever Jensen Huang says on Wednesday might be important for the tech sector.

If he doesn’t do anything grand that investors can hang their hats on, then maybe we test lows again for the major big market cap tech stocks.

That’s it for today.

There’s a lot of takeaways in the numbers.

That’s where we’re really focusing this week.

You need to be focusing on support and resistance.

Are we going to break to the downside?

Are we going to consolidate and try to move higher to get the bull market back on track?

Or is this just the beginning of the correction?

Be careful out there.

There’s a lot of stuff going on.

I’ll catch you guys next week.

Cheers.