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Some London mornings travel 60 pips by lunch, others stay inside 20. For scalping the first type is much better, so I've been trying to recognise them early.

What I check by 08:30 London, using EURUSD and GBPUSD:

• Size of the first 30 minutes compared with its 20-day average. Above 1.5 times the average, the rest of the morning was larger than usual about two thirds of the time in my notes.
• Whether the Asian range was broken in the first 15 minutes and held.
• Calendar: a 09:00 or 09:30 data release often extends the move.

None of this is a prediction of direction, only of range. On days that pass the first check I let my target run to 1.5R instead of taking 1R, and on quiet days I stop after two trades.

Over 90 days, this changed my average R per trade from about 0.12 to 0.17. The change came mostly from not overtrading the quiet days.

Does anyone use a similar volatility filter, maybe ATR-based?

Between roughly 11:30 and 12:30 London time, the market takes a breath. London desks are at lunch, New York hasn't shown up with force, and volume dips.

What follows is a short stretch of low conviction. Breakouts fail more often. Moves of 5 pips are followed by 4 pips of retracement. Indicators produce signals that look good and don't work.

The cure many scalpers find is the simplest one: don't trade it. But a more interesting observation is what comes after. The pause tends to compress volatility, and compressed volatility often leads to an expansion once the US data or the equity open arrives.

That expansion has a pattern. The first move is usually a fake, a sweep of the lunch range in one direction, followed by a real move the other way, or the same way with more force. Neither is guaranteed.

Marking the high and low of the lunch hour on the chart gives a clean reference. Trades in the next hour can be judged relative to those levels.

Is the lunch range worth marking, or is it just noise?