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Some days the New York open just doesn't deliver. No major data, no follow-through, EURUSD stuck in a 10-pip range. A few months ago I would have traded anyway. Now I have a short protocol.

At 14:30 London time I check three things:

• Has the 30-minute range after the open exceeded the Asia range? If not, it's a quiet tape.
• Is volume (tick volume or futures volume) below the 20-day average for that half hour?
• Is there anything scheduled before 16:00?

If it's quiet on all three:

1. No breakout trades. Breakouts on quiet days fail more often for me.
2. Range fades only at clear extremes, smaller size.
3. If nothing triggers by 15:30, I close the platform.

The reasoning: on a quiet tape, trades tend to come from boredom rather than setups, and breakouts have little volume behind them. You can check whether that applies to you by tagging each NY session as quiet or normal using the three checks above, then comparing average R per trade for the two groups after a couple of months.

What do you do on a dead NY open? Anyone switch to other instruments, like indices, instead?