Where the day shows its hand: markets with a real open and real intraday trends
The formula runs anywhere, but the premise — an early move that persists into the close — is a property of some markets and some days. This page is about which ones.
Key takeaway
- The method needs markets that trend within the day; deep index futures, energy and news-day large caps qualify
- It needs a meaningful open — on round-the-clock markets the anchor of the whole formula becomes a convention
- The original demands session-long attention; the daily-bar version compresses it to minutes and pays the one-bar lag for it
Liquid, volatile, and prone to one-way days
The system's whole premise is that an abnormal early move continues — so it needs markets that actually produce trending days, and enough liquidity that a stop order into momentum fills near its price. Index futures on volatile stretches, crude and the energy complex, and large-cap stocks on days with a catalyst are the canonical habitat. The instrument matters less than the day: the trigger only earns its keep when something is moving the market with intent.
| Market | Fit | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Index futures | The native habitat | Deep book at every level, defined session, and macro days that trend open-to-close |
| Energy and commodities | Strong | Supply news lands mid-session and drives one-way days; ranges are large relative to costs |
| Large-cap stocks | Situational | Best on catalyst days; on ordinary days the trigger buys drift and pays the spread |
| Round-the-clock crypto and FX | Awkward | No true open — the formula's anchor becomes an arbitrary session boundary, and the results depend on which one you pick |
The last row deserves the emphasis. The open is not incidental to the formula — it is the point the day's move is measured from, and it means something because an auction, a crowd and an overnight information gap all collide there. A market with no real open still lets you compute the arithmetic, but the number no longer marks what Williams's number marked.
The edge lives in volatility regimes, not in the calendar
The detail file's one-line summary of when this works — volatile, liquid markets that trend within the day — has a corollary worth stating: the same instrument moves in and out of fitness. An index future in a macro storm produces exactly the one-way days the trigger hunts; the same future in a quiet summer produces range days that hit the trigger and fade. The system is not wrong in the quiet regime, it is just paying its costs while waiting for its weather.
High-frequency systems reveal regime changes quickly — a month of results here carries more trades than a year of a trend system's. The flip side is the temptation to react to every cold fortnight as if the edge died. Judge it in R over hundreds of trades, or the frequency that is the system's strength becomes the reason you abandon it on schedule noise.
What running it actually asks of your day
The original is a day-trading commitment: compute the trigger at the bell, rest the buy stop, manage the intraday stop if filled, and exit at the close — attentive through the session even on the many days nothing triggers. The decisions are all pre-made, which keeps the attention mechanical rather than agonised, but the hours are still the hours.
The daily-bar version inverts the time profile: a few minutes after the close to check whether the day's high crossed the trigger, an order for the next open, done. What it hands back in hours it pays in fidelity — the one-bar-late fill, the overnight gap, the 2% stand-in stop. Which trade of time against faithfulness is right depends entirely on whose day job allows what; neither version is the free one.
Common questions
- Can it run on hourly bars instead of daily?
- The formula transplants — previous hour's range, current hour's open — but the premise does not come along automatically. The daily version leans on the structure of a session: an open where information gaps resolve and a close that forces the day to declare itself. An arbitrary hour boundary has neither. Test it as a new system if you must; do not assume the daily edge survives the move.
- How many markets should it run on at once?
- More than one, if costs allow — the edge is thin per trade, and diversification across a few unrelated markets smooths the streaks considerably. The caution is correlation at the trigger: on a macro day, every index future and half the commodity board hit their triggers together, and five positions become one large one. Cap the simultaneous risk, not just the per-market risk.
These are documented methods described for study. Nothing here is investment advice, a recommendation, or a claim about future returns — every system on this page has losing periods, and the pages say where.
Reading about a system is not having one.
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