The high and low of the first minutes of the session, used as a reference for breakouts and reversals during the day.
Common windows are the first 5, 15, or 30 minutes. The opening range breakout (ORB) enters when price clears that high or low with a stop on the other side. The logic is that the open sets the tone for the day.
ORB setups produce many fakeouts on range days. Filtering by relative-volume and higher-timeframe trend improves the odds but does not remove that.
Example: a stock trades $50.00 to $50.80 in the first 15 minutes. A buy stop at $50.85 with a stop-loss at $49.95 risks $0.90 for a target of $52.45 (twice the range).
Original diagrams for the ideas on this page. Illustrative, not real market data.
Range versus trend. On the left price keeps bouncing between the same floor and ceiling, which is a range. On the right each high and each low is higher than the last, inside a pair of sloping lines called a channel.Breakout and retest. Price stalls under the same level several times, pushes above it, then drops back to touch it from above before carrying on. That touch is the retest, where the old ceiling is tried as a floor. A break that falls straight back under it is a false breakout.
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