Education · Stage 5 · 08
Preparation before the open
Everything in this stage becomes useful at one moment: the twenty minutes before the session. Not to predict the day — to decide things while deciding is still cheap, because once the market is moving, every choice costs more and gets worse.
Mak · 4 min read · Stage 5, article 8 of 8
What follows is the routine from the playbook this site is built on, in its own order. It has four jobs and a final check.
1 · Read the night
Where is the contract against yesterday's close, and how far is that in points? Was the night one-sided or two-way? What did Asia and Europe do, and by how much?
The playbook also glances at the wider picture — the dollar, bond yields, oil — not to trade them, but because a move that is happening across everything is a different kind of morning from one that is only happening here.
2 · Mark the levels
Four things go on the chart before the open, and the abbreviations are worth knowing because everyone uses them:
- PDH and PDL — the previous day's high and low.
- ONH and ONL — the overnight session's high and low.
- Round numbers near price — the obvious ones, in whole hundreds.
- Unfilled distances from previous sessions on the daily chart.
These are not predictions. They are the places where, from the stage on buying and selling, other people's instructions are most likely to be resting. That is the whole reason to draw them, and it is a better reason than «they are important levels».
3 · Check the calendar
What is released today, at what time, and is a large index member reporting? The previous two articles are about why this matters. The check itself takes two minutes and it changes what a quiet morning means.
4 · Write the plan
The one that gets skipped, and the reason the other three are worth doing. Four lines:
- The bias, and the specific reason for it. «Up because the night held above yesterday's value» is a reason. «Up» is not.
- What kind of day you are expecting, and what would tell you that you were wrong about it.
- Where you will be looking — the levels from step 2, decided before anything is moving.
- The most you will lose today, as a number, decided now.
That last line is not optional and it is not conservatism. It is the arithmetic from stage 1 applied to a single day: the size of a loss you can absorb without changing how you trade tomorrow, chosen while you are calm.
The final check, and it is his
Two sentences close the routine in the playbook, and they are the best of it:
The plan is written down, not in your head. Mindset: process, not result.
Both are about the same failure. A plan held in your head rewrites itself while you watch — the level moves a little, the reason softens, the maximum loss becomes negotiable — and it does so without you noticing, because there is nothing to compare it against. Written on paper or on screen, it stays what it was, and any disagreement between it and what you are about to do becomes visible at the moment it matters.
And «process, not result» is what makes the routine survive a losing day. A day where you followed the plan and lost is a good day by the only standard you can control. A day where you abandoned it and won is the most expensive kind of win there is, because it will be repeated.
That is stage 5
Eight articles about the day itself: its windows, the range that sets its reference, the night that precedes it, the hole that night leaves on the chart, the events that interrupt it, the companies that move it, how far it usually travels, and the twenty minutes that prepare it.
Notice that not one of them told you what to trade. They told you what kind of day you are in, which is the question everything after this depends on: the next stage builds the map of levels, and the one after that finally looks at the flow underneath them.
If you want to go deeper
Two for the whole stage, and both are about days rather than trades.