Opening Range Breakout

Kristjan buys everything at once and aggressively — no scaling in, no waiting. He uses opening range highs (the high of the first one, five, or sixty minutes) as entry triggers, with the corresponding low as his initial stop. A one-minute opening range gets you in earlier with a tighter stop but has a higher failure rate; the sixty-minute range has fewer false starts but a wider stop. He accepts being stopped out intraday frequently — sometimes within two minutes of entry — because getting out fast and getting in precisely is how you keep losses small. Hesitation, he argues, only makes entries more expensive: you wait, the stop doubles in size, and now the risk-reward is broken before the trade has even started.

Williams explains how Bill Meehan — who tutored three traders including Williams — combined a fundamental directional framework with Williams's technical timing to produce a system that worked. Bill taught Williams how to determine where the market was headed over weeks and months; Williams developed the entry mechanism: a volatility breakout system built around the opening price, introduced around 1982. The logic is straightforward: calculate an expected range for the day, bracket a small distance above and below the opening, and enter in whichever direction price breaks. Williams notes the system worked powerfully in pit-session markets but became less effective once electronic trading eliminated the defined opening range, though the concept still applies to stocks and swing trading setups through patterns like the OOPS reversal.

"We just bracket that — a little bit above and below the opening."