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Most traders — and every talking head on CNBC — obsess over where the market closed yesterday.
But you can’t trade at yesterday’s close. That ship sailed the moment the bell rang.
What you can trade is today’s open.
And that changes everything, because the open is the true starting line.
It’s where the race actually begins. If price is above today’s open, you’re having an up day, at least at the beginning. If it’s below, you’re having a down day.
Simple as that.
Once you see the market this way, you start measuring what’s happening now instead of reacting to what already happened.
The beauty of focusing on opens is that they strip away a lot of the noise.
Gaps that look dramatic on a chart stop being confusing because the open resets the frame.
If price finishes above the open, the day is positive.
If it finishes below, it’s negative.
It doesn’t matter how wild the gap was — the open gives you a clean, honest starting point to work from.
The Real-World Example That Makes It Click
Let me give you a scenario that happens all the time, especially during earnings season.
Say a stock closes on Friday at $85. Monday morning, earnings hit and the stock gaps up to $100.
The market opens at $101, and everyone’s excited. Then it starts selling off and closes the day at $90.
The financial media will tell you the stock was up $5 on the day — because they’re measuring from Friday’s close. But if you bought at the open? You just lost $11.
That’s the gap between perception and reality.
When you anchor to opens, those confusing situations suddenly become simple. The gap up doesn’t distort the picture anymore.
From the open, the stock sold off all day, and that tells you the real story of the session.
I can’t start a race at the finish line.
I don’t buy a football ticket to show up in the last five seconds.
And I’m not going to let yesterday’s close dictate how I read today’s market.
How I Use Opens to Set My Bias
I track multiple opens: today’s, the week, the month and the year open.
These are clean reference points that clear out the emotional clutter that gaps and headlines create.
If price is below the week, month and year opens, there’s nothing to buy.
I’m either looking to short, or I’m staying out. It’s that straightforward.
And here’s a simple tip: Put your year open and month open on a piece of paper and stick it on the refrigerator.
Check in once in a while to see if your IRA or 401(k) is actually making money relative to where the year started.
You’d be surprised how clarifying that can be.
Opens don’t spin stories. They just tell you where the race began — and whether you’re ahead or behind from that point forward.
Geof Smith
Geof Smith Trading
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*This is for informational and educational purposes only. There is inherent risk in trading, so trade at your own risk.
PS. Don’t Go Spilling the Beans on These Sleeper Cells…
For more than five decades, a quiet market behavior has been operating in the background of U.S. equities.
These are not earnings reactions or headline-driven moves. They don’t show up on CNBC tickers or retail scanners. In fact, to the average trader, they’re completely invisible.
Internally, I refer to them as “Sleeper Cells.”
When one of these orders activates on any stock, the price often reverses sharply and begins moving higher, sometimes even when the broader market sentiment says to stay away.
For years, large institutional desks have quietly used this behavior to build positions at discounted levels, long before the move becomes obvious to the public.
Until recently, identifying these orders in real time wasn’t possible.
That’s changed.
A new discovery now allows us to see which stocks are currently carrying these Sleeper Cell orders, along with the exact price levels where they’re sitting.
From our research, they’ve moved big names like Dell, Shopify, and Unity.
While I’m still keeping this tightly controlled…
Naturally, there would have been smaller wins and those that did not work out, but…
I wanted to walk you through how these Sleeper Cell orders actually work and why they tend to precede sharp upside moves.
I’ll also share the full list of stocks where these setups are already lining up right now.
I can’t make absolute guarantees when it comes to the market…
But if you can keep this to yourself…
