Do you trade the first ten minutes?
- Thread starter Eight
- Start date
There are some nice opportunities pre-cash, but the first ten minutes I'd say is not for the faint-hearted; you have to be there for it though, especially in something like the Bund because it can open on or very near its high/low for the day and sometimes you can just get in and watch it go.
The open should be traded depending on where it opens in relation to support and resistance and the current trend.
However, ususally you want some sort of range to establish itself before making a move to examime the boundaries and determine later on if these boundaries are respected or not.
Examining the strength or weakness of Advancers minus Decliners when price is testing support or resistance is important enough so waiting a bit for more market data before making a move is usually the right call as you shoot for consistency in trading.
Trading is not a horse race, it's a chess game and I don't mean speed chess
Nexen
However, ususally you want some sort of range to establish itself before making a move to examime the boundaries and determine later on if these boundaries are respected or not.
Examining the strength or weakness of Advancers minus Decliners when price is testing support or resistance is important enough so waiting a bit for more market data before making a move is usually the right call as you shoot for consistency in trading.
Trading is not a horse race, it's a chess game and I don't mean speed chess
Nexen
I have found it consistently profitable to scalp off the open after 2 minutes , and play the impulse . allthough you have to be fast to kill a bad trade . Then wait 15 min untill a short term trend / direction plays out to trade further
It is extremely unlikely that the terrorists will time to attack at the US market opening time, 9:30 am EST.
If the attack happens in the middle of the night US time, the S&P futures would be sold off big right away. Most would sell their stocks in the pre-market hours way before the opening time of 9:30 am.
Quote from Eight:
I'm embracing the chaos here.. I'll master this thing... but it's stressful trading sim money in real time hours, I need to practice after hours on replay data
Don't cheat yourself. It is like betting on the horses after knowing which one has already won.
If you want to practice, practice in real-time. Write down your bet, entry and exit as if you would trade. Then review the result and learn from your own moves.
I trade the opening everyday. Even when I am on vacation, I would not forego the chance to trade the opening. There are only approx 260 openings in a year. I make about 70% of my total gain from trading the first 30 minutes, and most of the time in the first 5 to 10 minutes alone.
Depends on what you trade. Different stocks behave differently at the opening minutes. I trade only 5 stocks day-in and day-out. GS, SKF, SPY, AAPL, RIMM. I have learned their behaviors at the opening. They almost gap in every opening. Sometimes small, sometimes big. From my experience, gaps are to be faded. Works about 70-80% of the time. The other 10-20%, they just gap-and-go (usually on a Monday, or usually when they break above resistance with the gap or break below support.) And another 10% of the time, maybe, they gap-and-flat - not moving at all. If you find yourself wrong fading the gap and there is no reversal, just close out and flip your position to go with the gap.
Trading the opening is not for the faint-of-heart. Gaps are typically created by amatuers. But it doesn't mean necessarilty they benefit the amatuers. Quite the opposite they benefit the pros.
The key to trading the opening: fade the gap or the quick up/down move (but beware of the 20% chance of gap-and-go). These stocks typically go through a reversal at least once. Sometime twice. But rarely more than twice. For example, AAPL can gap up 1.00 from prior day's close, then immediately drops 2.00 to 3.00 in the first 5 minutes, then reverses back up. Those are great trading opportunities.
Just pull up their charts and study how they behave at the opening. The more you read or experience the opening's seemingly chaotic actions, the more you can get better at trading it.
When I started this thread I was thinking in terms of a fixed period of time but now I see that there are occasional days where the market isn't talking my language for almost the whole first half hour but most days I'm good to go after about 6-10 minutes... I think there are occasional days where the daily chart will predict the overall direction of the day but not say much about the open ahead of time.. [talking the YM here]. It makes little sense that there could be much predictibility about the open of the YM, brokers are using it to hedge their stock orders [so I'm told] and probably lots of orders are not coming to them until after the open... it is what it is...
I agree. Amateurs can practice trading equities midday on a vast majority of stocks that consolidate in a range. They make the initial run for 60-90 minutes, then close into a narrow range of .10-.50 cents depending on the price. A beginner can comfortably take profits between support and resistance of the range with tight stops, limiting losses. And if they're lucky they may be on the right side of the trade when price breaks out of the range.
I once made nearly $2000 trading UAUA in a midday range, and another time made over $900 trading WTR in a range. And that was strictly trading to the short side from the top of the range.
