a lot of technical analysis is done on psychological levels related to (in my opinion) SPY strike prices/SPX strike prices/SPX levels.
Yet, /ES is typically 20 points ahead of SPX. For example, there can be a battle zone of support/resistance at 4900 on SPX, but /ES blew past it a day ago. I wasn't sure if one had more power/prominence than the other.
There is no such thing as support/resistance in reality.
Where would you say 80% of the daily trade volume comes from on average?
The powers to be that I can think of:
institutional investors / fund managers slowly reallocating (selling stuff off, buying stuff) daily
high frequency trading algorithms trading shares back and forth to each other in an artificial way to generate synthetic volume/movement
market makers reacting to option chain volume to remain neutral
"hedge funds" / "quant funds" running their algorithm
what do those algorithms look for at the "minute by minute" scale if not things like support/resistance/patterns/volume?