What is Opening range?

What does Opening range mean in practice?

Markets often make their first decisive moves shortly after opening, so many traders mark the first 15, 30 or 60 minutes and treat the range as a reference. A break above the high is read as strength, and a break below the low as weakness.

The window length is a choice, and it should be fixed in advance rather than chosen by looking back at which worked. The idea needs a clearly defined session open, which is unambiguous for exchange-traded stocks and indices and a convention for markets that trade around the clock.

A worked example

Illustrative only: in the first 30 minutes price ranges between 24,780 and 24,830. A later candle closing above 24,830 is a break of the opening range to the upside.

How to read or test it

Fix the window length and the definition of the session open before testing, and keep them constant. Run it across many sessions and look at how often the first break was the real direction compared with a false start. Compare different window lengths to see how sensitive the result is. Pay attention to gap days and to days with scheduled news, which tend to behave differently from ordinary ones.

How AKQX handles Opening range

An opening-range breakout is among the strategy templates AKQX has planned, and it was marked coming soon at the time of writing, so check the Templates section in the app for its current status. The window length is the kind of setting that has to be fixed in advance in any test.

See No-code algo strategy builder for the feature page.

A common mistake

Picking the window length after seeing which one would have worked best.

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