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Borrowing the initial balance idea from futures for the first London hour

Futures traders talk about the initial balance, the range of the first hour of the cash session. The idea is that the first hour shows where the big participants are willing to trade, and the rest of the day either stays inside it, extends it a bit, or breaks out and keeps going.

There's no central exchange in spot FX, but the London open has a similar feel. So I've been marking the 08:00 to 09:00 London range on EURUSD and GBPUSD and watching what happens after.

Roughly three kinds of day show up. Days where price stays inside the first hour range almost all session, which reward fading the edges. Days where one side breaks by a modest amount and then price comes back in, the extension that fails. And days where one side breaks and never looks back, a trend day.

The useful part isn't predicting which day it'll be. It's that by around 10:00 you usually have a decent idea which one you're in, and that changes what setups make sense. Fading the range on a trend day is painful. Chasing breakouts on a range day is just as bad.

I don't have a big enough sample yet to put numbers on it, so treat this as a framework rather than an edge.

Width matters. A very narrow first hour often comes before a bigger move later, while a very wide one tends to contain most of the day. Comparing the first hour range to the average daily range for the pair gives a quick read. If the first hour already covers most of a normal day's range, I'm a lot less keen on breakout trades for the rest of the session, because the day might have used up most of its move already. On those days I'd rather fade the edges of the first hour than chase a break of them, at least until something changes.