Labelling swings before the open
A pre-open ritual for marking overnight structure so the first five-minute bar has somewhere to land.
Most unfinished mornings begin with a blank chart and a hope that the opening print will “show its hand.” In class we reverse that. Before the bell, mark the overnight high and low, the last accepted balance, and any equal highs that still look unfinished. Those three marks are enough to greet the open without inventing a new story every minute.
A short sequence
- Switch to a higher timeframe only long enough to note overnight extremes.
- Drop to your execution timeframe and transfer those levels by hand.
- Leave space on the page for the opening range — do not fill it early.
Students who skip step two often discover, mid-session, that their “new” resistance was already printed offshore. The fix is boring and effective: transfer levels before ambition arrives.
What we leave alone
We do not pre-draw entries. Pre-open work is descriptive. Once the opening range forms, the intensive curriculum takes over with invalidation sentences and live marking. Until then, your job is simply to give price a context it can accept or reject.