Not sure that I've seen this type of action in ES before. (at least not so persistently). It's been several weeks of alternating one-way moves up/down/up/down/up, etc, etc...Certainly algo's have played a big part.
You still see 2020 this week? How about your 4hr Daily downtrend observations because we making fresh highs.
Well the past 2 days definitely have the OpEx thing going. If I remember correctly, August 2015 and the second part of Dec 2015 (post Fed announcement) are the only 2 down OpEx's last year...Jan 2016 was down, but Feb/Mar up big... The bull side almost always has some time tendency going for it...The bear side sneaks in a few days here and there.
One thing that I noticed even when we were trading down in that 2025-30 ES range...One of my better indicators (works great marking bottoms, so-so with tops) was diverging greatly with price...i.e. it had turned sharply lower but the ES just kept churning sideways with alternating one-way rallies higher...Even on the smaller TF's when I see that divergence, it almost always resolves higher. Of course the challenge is that the breaks higher/lower invariably are very "spikey", so you either try to anticipate them or you take your chances chasing a move higher...Once these moves get going there are a series of 3-5 pt pullbacks but that's about it.