Is it still summer?
Everyone has been anticipating more trading action since the Labor Day weekend is finally behind us. As usual, “everyone” was wrong.
We started with a small gap to the upside, drifted down for the next 45 minutes, and that was pretty much the end of the trading day. First hour range: 5 points. Day range: 5.3 points. Toby Crabel once did a study of narrow range days. He popularized the NR7 (narrowest range in seven days) and the NR4. I wonder what he’d make of an NR88!
The real question, unless you’re a scalper, is how to avoid trading this type of day. One possibility is watching the first hour. If I can’t find a reasonable trade in the first hour and the range is quite narrow, I mark off the high and low and wait for a breakout. Unless you count the three-tick break at 11:00, it never happened. And I never traded.
