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Previous day high sweep on GBPUSD at the NY open, why I wait for the M5 close back under

cable loves to poke the previous day high right around the NY open and a lot of people get chopped trying to buy the breakout. What I do instead is draw the line at yesterday's high on M5 and just watch. If price spikes through it and an M5 candle closes back under, I start looking for a short. Entry is the retest of the line from below, not the close itself. Stop sits above the spike wick with a little room for spread. First target is the nearest M5 swing low, and if London already made a clean range I'll leave a piece for the middle of it.

The filter that matters most for me is what London did before. If London already trended hard into that high, the sweep often just keeps going, so I skip. I want a London session that was kind of messy and rotational, then a sweep into the level. Anyone else trade the previous day levels at NY, or do you find it too random?

One thing I should have said in the first post is how I judge whether London was messy enough. I look at the M15 chart from 07:00 GMT onward. If I can count two or more swings that overlap each other and price is sitting roughly in the middle of the overnight range before the NY open, that counts as rotational. If London printed three or four big candles in one direction with barely any pullback, it was a trend morning and the sweep idea goes in the bin for the day. It sounds fussy but it filters out most of the trades that used to stop me out.

For anyone asking about the target, the nearest M5 swing low is usually only a handful of pips away, so I take most of the position off there and move the stop on the rest to just above the retest candle. I do not move it to entry straight away, because cable loves to come back and tag the level one more time before it drops. If the runner gets to the middle of the London range, great. If price closes back above the previous day high on M5 at any point, the whole idea is wrong and whatever is left comes off.

Something I noticed when I went back through my screenshots for this setup. The good ones nearly always had the spike happen within the first fifteen or twenty minutes of the NY session. When the poke above yesterday's high came much later, around lunch in London, it was far more likely to just grind higher. My guess is the early spike is people getting squeezed on the open and the later one is real buying. So I now only take it if the sweep happens early, and anything late gets ignored even if it looks nice on the chart.