The MarketDelta Blog

This week, a user asked how to best view and study historical opening ranges.

Market Profile users, in particular, are used to seeing the Opening Range on every profile chart. The opening range’s duration may be customized, but it often refers to just the first minute of trading of the RTH session that starts at 8:30 am Central Time.

Some traders place great emphasis on the opening range, and devise trade setups around it. Since the first 30 minutes of the session is often the most active, highest-volume part of the day, it makes sense to gain insight into these first moments of the session.

If you wish to analyze opening ranges for the past several months, you would simply build a 1-minute multi-pane chart that starts at 8:30 am each day, and set the Period to “Last 200 days” or whatever you wish. Then you could scroll through the price history and observe the beginning of each day.

But if you want to really focus in on just the first minute, there is a more elegant solution that benefits those looking to study just these first few minutes: Create a custom session.

Visit the Setup menu > Preferences > Sessions. Click “New” and type a name for the new session you are creating, such as “Opening Range.” After you press OK, you are presented with a normal Session settings screen, which you can modify as follows:

A few points about this:

1. This example is for Eastern Time zone; you can adjust accordingly
2. “Post Time” should be unchecked for this purpose
3. Don’t forget to change the “pm” to “am” for the “Stop Time” — easily overlooked
4. The Stop Time can be set to anything you want; in this case, it lets us view the first minute, the opening range, and the following few minutes as well.

After you press OK, you can apply this session setting, and other necessary settings, to any chart, by right-clicking the chart and choosing Preferences > Chart:

To see the opening range, it should be a 1-minute chart, noted at the top under Periodicity, set to “Last 100 days” if you wish to see a few months’ worth of opening ranges. The session is set to your new session. After you press OK, you will see:

The first 5 minutes of every trading day.

Need more granularity?

The example above is easy to setup, and you can easily view several months, hundreds of days of opening ranges in this way, since all it requires is minute data.

But if you download Tick data, you can really see what is happening during the opening range by choosing bars based on seconds, not minutes. For example, a 10-second setting will divide the opening range into 6 bars.

To change the Periodicity to 10-seconds, set it to the following:

At which point, you will see this on your chart:

If you want to get particularly fancy, you can use the Paint Bars indicator to highlight just the opening range so it is easily to distinguish from the following minutes and seconds. You would need the Professional version of the software to highlight the bars based on time, using a simple RTL signal like this:

This signal simply requires that the affected bar be before 9:31am Eastern Time. (For more about creating custom signals, please click here to see another recent article.)

Now you can add a Paint Bars indicator based on this signal, as follows:

In the below example, I use the “Paint Background” setting in the Paint Bars indicator to highlight the opening range, based on 10-second bars:

You could then scroll through many days’ worth of opening ranges to see how they behaved and affected the following minutes. Remember, this second-based chart periodicity requires Tick data, and the Paint Bars implementation shown here requires Professional.