Day Trading Setups
Opening Range Fade
Most of the session's first breakout attempts are also its most common trap. Fading the break means betting the first move out of the box is the one that snaps back, not the one that runs.
Judge the break, bet fade or follow
Set how many bars build the opening range, then watch the box form and the first break print. Before the tape plays forward, decide: Fade (bet it snaps back inside the range) or Follow (bet it keeps going). The size of that first break relative to the range's own height is real and visible, and the scoreboard below splits results by how big the break actually was.
Building the opening range…
| Break size vs. OR height | Trials | Faded | Ran | Fade win rate |
|---|
How it works
- The opening range is just the high and low of the first N bars. Every bar in the window contributes, the box is real, not a guess drawn after the fact.
- Break size is measured against the range's own height, not a fixed number. A break that's 20% of the range's height behaves very differently from one that's 120% of it, so every trial gets bucketed into small, medium, or large before it's scored.
- Fade means betting on a close back inside the range. The simulator plays the session forward and checks whether price actually closes back between the OR high and low within the next several bars, or keeps extending away from it.
- The bucketed win rate is the whole point of this page. Run enough trials in each size bucket and a real, visible relationship shows up: fading tends to work better against small breaks and worse against large ones, which is the entire logic behind trading this way in the first place.
Where this breaks
The large breaks are rarer, and they're exactly the ones that ruin a fade
A fader who only sizes small and medium breaks looks fine for a long stretch, because those setups genuinely revert more often than not. The problem is the large-break trials, less frequent, but real, and they're precisely the setups where fading loses hardest, because a break that's already 100% or more of the range's own height usually has real participation behind it, not just an overextended wick. One or two large breaks faded in a row can erase a long run of small, correct fades, which is why break size has to be judged before the position goes on, not after it's already losing.