A couple of years ago I wrote a post about shaved opens — those rare sessions where the first bar of the day opens exactly on its high or low. I’ve been thinking about them again lately, and I wanted to come back and add a layer to what I said before.
The original post still stands. This one builds on it.
Key Stats (ES example)
- Bar 1 is the high or low of the day less than 27% of the time.
- A shaved open (OOH or OOL) happens on 1.8% of sessions.
- A shaved open survives the whole day 0.42% of the time overall
| Instrument | Bar 1 = HOD or LOD | Shaved open | Shaved open survives full day |
|---|---|---|---|
| ES | 27.1% | 1.82% | 0.42% |
| FDAX | 29.6% | 6.44% | 1.63% |
| HSI | 27.62% | 11.99% | 2.22% |
| NK225 | 24.84% | 34.50% | 5.17% |
What a Shaved Open Actually Is
On the first bar of the RTH session either has a tail on top, a tail on the bottom, both, or neither. A shaved open is the “neither on one side” version — the open prints exactly on the bar’s high (so no upper tail at all) or exactly on the bar’s low (so no lower tail at all). Price walked one direction from the opening tick and never came back through it while Bar 1 was forming.
It’s rare. On most instruments I look at, it happens on something like 2% of sessions.
Two Rare Things, Not One
Here’s the bit I want to add to the original post. When you see a shaved open on Bar 1, you’ve just watched one rare event happen. But stacked on top of it is a second rare event, and this one is rarer still: the shaved level actually surviving the whole session as the day’s high or low.
Simply: most of the time, price comes back through the opening level before the close. Bar 1’s extreme doesn’t hold as the HOD or LOD of the day — it gets broken somewhere along the way. That’s true on normal days, and it’s true on shaved open days too.
So I’m not betting on the rarer thing happening. I’m betting against it. Shaved Bar 1 forms, I note the level, and I wait for price to move away and then come back to test it. The open of Bar 1 is my reference — and because it’s a shaved bar, the open is an exact tick, not buried inside a wick. Clean level, clean target.
Trade This Intraday
You can look at a daily bar that shaved its high or low and think “interesting”, but by the time the daily bar has printed, the whole thing is already over. The two rare events have both resolved. There’s nothing to trade.
The only way to see this live is on an intraday chart where Bar 1 is a meaningful slice of the session. 5-minute and 15-minute are where I watch it. 1-minute works too. 30-minute is fine. Anything above 60 minutes and Bar 1 is just too big a chunk of the day for this to mean anything.
The Free Indicator
I’ve put a free TradingView indicator out there — Zen RTH Open = HOD/LOD.
Its OPEN SOURCE of course so you can copy to your AI of chaoice and get him to make it for your platform of choice.
It does one thing: it marks the first bar of the session with an arrow and a translucent background highlight when the open is shaved. It also keeps a running count at the top right of how often the condition is showing up across your chart history, so you can get a feel for the base rate on whatever you trade.
Drop it on a 5-minute or 15-minute chart of ES, DAX, Hang Seng, Nikkei, or whatever you trade. Scroll back. Look at what Bar 1 did and what happened after. That’s the drill.
Homework
Pull up a 5-minute chart of whatever you trade with this indicator loaded. Scroll back through thefew years and find every shaved open. For each one, ask yourself:
- Did price come back to the opening tick before the close?
- If yes, how long did it take? Which bar?
- If no, what did the rest of the session look like?
- What was price doing right before it came back to test the level?
My Trade in the Brooks Price Action Live Stream
I was long back to the Bar 1 high.
Join the Brooks Price Action Trading room to get access to it.
Happy trading!
Tim
Zen Trading Tech
Zen Trading Tech 
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