Asian range sweeps at the London open

[Shadow Trader]

A pattern that gets discussed endlessly, with good reason: the Asian session tends to build a tight range, and when London opens, price often pokes beyond one edge, grabs the stops sitting there, then reverses.

The reasoning is simple. Many traders place stops just beyond the Asian high or low, and breakout traders place pending orders there too. That's a pool of orders. Larger players can push price through the pool to fill their own orders, and then move the other way.

It doesn't always work. Sometimes the break is real and runs for an hour. The difference is hard to read in the moment, which is why the sweep setup needs a confirmation: a return back inside the range, a failed follow-through candle, a change in short-term momentum.

Some key details that improve the odds:

- Define the Asian range consistently, using the same hours every day.

- Ignore ranges that are unusually wide, since the sweep logic needs a compact range.

- Check what happened the day before, since a news-driven Asian move is a different animal.

- Avoid Mondays after a gap and Fridays with early closes.

How is the Asian range defined, and what counts as confirmation of a sweep?