Field note · 8 July 2026
Marks to make on paper before the cash open
The Opening Auction Briefing lasts seventy-five minutes and ends before people rush to their own screens. The sheet they take with them is almost empty on purpose. A crowded page of levels, copied from someone else’s evening, does not survive the first half hour of a real open. Three marks do.
The first mark is the prior session’s point of control, copied from a finished profile, not from memory. It is a reference for where business was done yesterday, not a prediction that price must return there. The second mark is the prior value-area high and low, two short ticks. The third is a blank line labelled “today’s early tall bar,” which stays blank until the opening has actually printed enough trade to deserve a mark. Filling it in advance is how a worksheet turns into fiction.
Beside those marks we leave a single question, written in ordinary words: was the first push initiative, or was it a response? The briefing practises the question on yesterday’s open, out loud, so the wording is already in the mouth. Then the room stops. There is no second page of scenarios. People who want a longer apprenticeship sit the four Wednesday evenings of the Reading Studio. The morning exists so the first hour of a session has a small, finished ritual.
What we refuse to put on the sheet is a list of prices “to watch” with no volume behind them. If a price was not thick, and was not a clear extreme with excess, it does not earn ink before the open. That rule feels strict on a quiet morning and obvious on a violent one, when an over-marked page becomes impossible to read.
Bring a pencil you like. The academy prints the prior profile; you only copy three marks and leave one line empty. Phones stay in the basket by the door until 08:45, so the case study is not interrupted by a notification from a chart you already closed.