The DAX open never behaves the same way twice, and that’s the first thing you have to make peace with. Some mornings it gaps, spikes, reverses, or chops sideways for an hour before it commits to a direction, other mornings it barely moves at all, as though it hasn’t had its coffee yet, and every so often it’s clean from the first bar. There’s no way to know in advance which version you’re getting, and that uncertainty is usually my cue to stay out. There are always exceptions, but the safer approach is almost always to sit on your hands and let the move come to you.
The first fifteen minutes
Watch the open closely and it looks less like a market than a negotiation, price finding its range, testing stops, filling gaps, edging one way and then pulling back the other with no real commitment to either side. Unless something clean shows up early, I’ll usually give it fifteen to twenty minutes before I even think about a trade.
What I’m waiting for is confirmation: a steady move in one direction, ideally breaking out of the opening range and holding it, not faking through and snapping straight back. Three or four solid bars moving cleanly one way, followed by a clean pullback, an ABC correction if I’m lucky, and now it’s something I’ll take.
The trade
The chart below is a fairly typical morning, choppy into the open, then direction once the first fifteen minutes had passed. There was a Frankfurt Open trade earlier that came back to break-even, a story for another post. The London Open move is the one that earns the write-up.
The first London Open bar was strong, but price then struggled to break the overnight range and spent a while chopping in wicky, indecisive candles, unwilling to commit either way. Once it finally did, it moved cleanly down through London Open, Frankfurt Open, and the Day Open/Close cluster, the kind of move that’s hard to ignore once it gets going.
M1 — sell entry after price retraced into the Day Close level, AC/ABC confirmation in eWaves, R:R 5.72
Price then retraced back up into a supply zone lining up with the Day Close level, solid confluence, and formed a clean Acceleration Correction, the ABC visible in the eWaves indicator below the chart. That combination is exactly what fifteen minutes of chop is waiting to produce. The target sat down at the H1 and M1 target zones eWaves had already projected, giving an R:R of 5.72 on the entry.
Lessons
Every year, month, week, and session is different, but having clear rules for what you’ll trade and when gives you an edge, and the harder part is the discipline and patience to wait for those rules to be met. Experience with an instrument helps: the DAX tends to either run cleanly from the open or fake one way before reversing into the real move, and plenty of mornings it just chops for hours and never commits at all.
The lesson underneath all of it is to watch what the market is doing, not what you expect it to do. Wait for a clean setup to come to you, and if you’re not sure, stay out.
Nothing on this page is financial advice. Trade your own account, manage your own risk.