Most of the articles here are about the market — what a level is, how max pain behaves, why bonds move the NQ. This one is different. This one is about me — the rules I actually live by when I sit down to trade. They're not laws of the market. They're my decisions. But they're not arbitrary, and the reasoning behind them is worth more than the rules themselves.
Because here's the thing nobody tells you when you start: most of trading well is deciding when not to trade. The losses that take people out don't come from bad entries when they should have been in. They come from trading when they had no business being in the market at all. So before I ever talk about a setup, I talk about the times I refuse to take one.
I don't trade the premarket
Before the open, the market is thin. Fewer participants, wider spreads, and moves that look meaningful but are really just a handful of orders pushing price around in a vacuum. A level that "breaks" premarket often means nothing once the real volume shows up at 9:30.
I'm not interested in trading a market where I can't trust what I'm seeing. Premarket price action is a preview, not a signal. I watch it to get oriented — where are we relative to yesterday, what's the overnight range, is there news — but I don't act on it. I wait for the real market to open.
I don't trade the opening range — I build it
This is the one people push back on the most, so let me be clear about the reasoning.
The first stretch after the open is the most chaotic part of the day. Overnight orders clearing, news getting priced in, everyone repositioning at once. Price whips in both directions, takes out stops on both sides, and hands out losses to anyone convinced they know the direction. I call it amateur hour — not to insult anyone, but because it's exactly where inexperience gets punished. It looks like opportunity because it's moving fast. Fast is not the same as tradeable.
So I don't trade it. I use it. That early range — the high and low price carves out while it's thrashing — becomes information. It gives me the boundaries of the session's early battle: a high that acted as resistance, a low that acted as support, both set by real volume. Once that range is built, I have something to trade around. Trading it while it's forming is gambling on noise. Waiting for it to form and then using it is trading with structure.
That's the difference between the two, and it's the whole reason I sit on my hands early: I'm not missing the move. I'm collecting the information the move gives me.
My window is the middle of the day
By late morning, the opening chaos has settled. The range is built, the initial repositioning is done, and price starts to actually respect levels instead of blowing through everything. That's when the market becomes readable — when a level holding or breaking means something, because there's real participation behind it.
So that's my window. I let the morning settle, I trade the readable part of the day, and I'm done before the afternoon fades. It's a deliberately narrow slice, and that's the point. I'm not trying to catch every move. I'm trying to trade only when the conditions are ones I understand and trust.
I don't trade the afternoon drift
Later in the session, especially the dead middle-to-late afternoon, volume thins out again. The conviction moves are mostly done, and what's left is drift — slow, directionless grinding that looks like a trend right up until it reverses on you for no reason. It has some of the same problems as the premarket: not enough participation to trust the move.
By then I've either made my day or I haven't, and either way the afternoon isn't where I go looking to fix it. Trading tired, in a thin market, trying to force a result — that's how a good day becomes a bad one. I'd rather be flat.
I don't trade into events
When there's a scheduled economic release — the kind that moves the whole market in a heartbeat — I'm not in the market for it, and I'm not rushing in right after. Before the number, nobody knows which way it breaks, and being positioned into it is just betting on a coin flip with a lot of leverage. Right after, the first move is often a fake that reverses once the market digests the actual number.
So I stand aside — before the release and until it settles out. Then, once the dust clears and price is trading on the new information instead of the shock of it, I can look again. Missing the initial spike costs me nothing. Getting caught in it can cost me the day.
Why these rules, and why they're mine
Notice what all of these have in common. Every one of them is about avoiding the parts of the day where I can't trust what I'm seeing — thin markets, chaotic markets, event-driven markets. I'm not trying to be in the market as much as possible. I'm trying to be in it only when it's readable, and out of it the rest of the time.
Premarket
Thin, untrustworthy. A preview, not a signal. I wait for the real open.
The opening range
Amateur hour. I don't trade it — I use it to build the day's boundaries.
The afternoon drift
Volume thins, moves go directionless. I'm already done by then.
Into events
Stand aside before a release and until it settles. The first move is often a fake.
My window is the readable middle of the day — after the open settles, before the afternoon fades.
That's a personal choice, and I want to be honest that it is a choice. Plenty of people trade the open. Some trade the events. There are traders who make a living doing exactly the things I refuse to do — because they've built an edge there and they understand that terrain. I haven't, and I don't, so I stay out. My rules fit how I think, my temperament, and the specific way I read the market. Yours might land somewhere different.
But whatever you decide, decide it in advance and know why. The worst version of this is having no rules — trading whenever, because it's moving, because you're bored, because you want your money back. That's not trading. The whole point of a rule you set when you're calm is that it protects you from the decision you'd make when you're not.
This is the way I trade. Not the way you have to. But it's clear, it's deliberate, and it's mine — and that clarity, more than any single setup, is what keeps me consistent.