Reading True Opens
A True Open turns a moment on the clock into a price line — and that line sorts the day into premium and discount. Here is the whole hierarchy, the bias rule, and how stacking them sharpens the read.
Quarterly Theory reads time first — the framework the previous guide walks through. A True Open is where that idea starts to become tradeable: it takes a fixed moment on the clock — the open of a cycle's second quarter — and turns it into a horizontal price level that sorts the market into premium and discount.
What a True Open is
A True Open is the opening price of the second quarter (Q2) of any cycle. Not the calendar open, not your broker's daily open — the open of Q2 specifically. There's a reason it's Q2: in the AMDX sequence, Q2 is the Manipulation phase — the Judas Swing that fakes traders out before the real move. Its opening price is the algorithmic reference the whole manipulation is measured against.
Daye calls True Opens “filters of time”: they don't definitively tell you to buy or sell — but they help filter your bias, telling you whether to look for longs or shorts, so long as confluencing factors such as SSMT align. Everything else hangs off them.
Premium and Discount — the bias rule
Once the level is set, price's position relative to it gives you a directional lean. The rule is the same at every scale:
- Price above a True Open → premium → bias leans bearish (look for shorts).
- Price below a True Open → discount → bias leans bullish (look for longs).
That's it — a True Open is a midline, and the market is either trading rich (premium) or cheap (discount) relative to it. The lean isn't an instruction; it's the side you favour while you wait for a setup to confirm.
The hierarchy of opens
Because every cycle has a Q2, every cycle has a True Open — from the year down to the 90-minute block. Each one is a level on the same logic; together they stack into a top-down map of bias. Higher cycles set the broad lean; lower cycles time the entry.
| True Open | Name | Anchor (New York time) |
|---|---|---|
| TYO | True Year Open | 1st Monday of April, 18:00 NY |
| TMO | True Month Open | Open of the second weekly candle (≈ 2nd Monday) |
| TWO | True Week Open | Monday 18:00 NY (the open of the “Tuesday” daily candle) |
| TDO | True Day Open | 00:00 NY (midnight — the Daily Q2 / London open) |
| TSO | True Session Opens — True Asia / London / NY-AM / NY-PM Open | Asia 19:30 · London 01:30 · NY-AM 07:30 · NY-PM 13:30 |
| TMSO | True Micro Session Open | Q2 of each 90-minute block (+22.5 min after its open) |
| NaTO* | True Nano Open | Q2 of each 22.5-minute block (+5.6 min) — an advanced, 15-second extension |
* Nano is an advanced, scalper-level extension — a ~5.6-minute quarter, best read on a 15-second chart.
The intraday opens are the ones you'll watch most. The trading day below is the Daily cycle's four sessions; the open of each session's Q2 block is a True Session Open — the True Asia, London, NY-AM and NY-PM Opens — and midnight, the open of the day's Q2 session, is the True Day Open.
Stacked True Opens
One open gives you a lean. Several opens agreeing gives you conviction. This is where the hierarchy pays off: when price sits on the same side of two or more opens at once, the read is far stronger than any single level. Two things are going on in that word stacked: the opens sit in order against each other, faster cycles against slower ones — and which side of that stack price is on is the read you take from it.
@LethalityTrader sets the threshold in two parts. The floor: “for a sell, you want to see that you are above at least two opens or true opens. And vice versa for buys.” And the upgrade: “use at least three True Opens… your accuracy will increase dramatically.” So two opens on the same side is a workable stacked lean — the fallback — while three or more is the preferred read: above the stack is premium (short lean), below it discount (long lean).
Synced True Opens
A stack is one market's read. The next question is whether the rest of the correlated triad — the two markets you'd normally compare this one against — is saying the same thing — and the way to ask it is to look at the order, not the price. If NQ, ES and YM all carry the same True Opens in the same vertical order, the triad agrees on structure. That is a Synced True Open run.
Note what is not being asked. Sync says nothing about where price is trading — that is the stacked read above. It is a statement about arrangement alone, which is what makes it steady: a True Open is fixed by the clock the moment it prints, so a synced run holds until the next open prints. It does not flicker as price moves through it.
Sync is rarer than a stack, and that is the point: it takes three markets to produce and only one to break. Treat it the same way as everything else on this page — as context that firms up a lean, not as a reason to be in a trade.
A filter, not a trigger
This is the point beginners most often miss. A True Open is a time filter: it tells you which way to lean and where price is at a premium or discount. It is not an entry — crossing a True Open is not a buy or sell signal. It's one ingredient in a stack of conditions:
- 1 True Open sets the bias
- 2 HTF PDA where
- 3 SSMT confirms the bias
- 4 qsCISD / PSP the entry trigger — either, or both
- 5 Stop · Target beyond swing · liquidity
The True Open filters which side is valid; a higher-timeframe price array (a fair-value gap, order block or liquidity level) is where you act; divergence (SSMT) confirms that something is turning. They're confluences that add up — the True Open is one of them, qualifying the read rather than firing it.
The Weekly open puzzle — “Tuesday's open”
Daye's own note says the True Week Open is “Tuesday's Open,” which trips people up. The weekly cycle's quarters are Monday–Thursday (Q1–Q4), so Q2 is Tuesday. But in a 24-hour futures session the bar conventionally labelled “Tuesday” actually opens at Monday 18:00 NY (it runs Mon 18:00 → Tue 18:00). Both statements describe the same instant — so the canonical anchor is Monday 18:00 NY. Anchoring it to Tuesday midnight is the common mistake.
The Monthly open has a cousin problem: months rarely start on a Monday, so “the second week's open” is counted from the first full weekly candle — partial first weeks are ignored. And when a month spans five Mondays, the fifth is a “joker week” with no defined role: the True Month Open isn't redrawn for it.
It doesn't flip in XAMD
A cycle can run the XAMD profile instead of AMDX, where the manipulation lands in Q3 rather than Q2. It would be natural to assume the True Open moves with it — it doesn't. In Daye's words the rule is static: “the opening price of Q2 will always be its true open. So if the profile is X-AMD … you will use the opening price of Q2 to gauge the Judas Swing, which will present itself in Q3.”
The practical upshot: you never need to know whether a cycle is AMDX or XAMD to plot its True Open. It's always Q2's open. The profile only changes which quarter the manipulation shows up in.
Which opens show on which timeframe
A Yearly open on a 1-minute chart would span thousands of bars; a Micro open on a daily chart would be sub-bar. So each level only makes sense up to a certain timeframe. A common convention:
| True Open | Show up to |
|---|---|
| TYO — Year | Weekly |
| TMO — Month | 4 hour |
| TWO — Week | 1 hour |
| TDO — Day | 15 min (decoupled — useful on every TF as a low-timeframe reference) |
| TSO — Session | 5 min |
| TMSO — Micro | 1 min |
| NaTO — Nano | 15 sec |
One more rule of hygiene: don't draw a True Open as an infinite forward ray. Once a new cycle begins, the prior cycle's True Open loses relevance — respect the cycle boundary.
What beginners get wrong
- Using the broker's daily open as the TDO. The True Day Open is always 00:00 NY, whatever your chart's daily candle anchor is.
- Ignoring New York time and DST. Everything anchors to
America/New_Yorkand rolls with daylight saving — offset arithmetic drifts an hour for half the year. - Anchoring the Weekly open to Tuesday midnight instead of Monday 18:00 NY (see above).
- Counting the Monthly open from a partial first week, or redrawing it on the fifth-Monday joker week.
- Treating a True Open as an entry trigger. It's a filter — entries come from divergence + a price array, not the level itself.
- Re-anchoring the open in XAMD. It's Q2's open in both profiles, full stop.
Beyond the six — Nano, Quadrennial, Generational
The six levels above are the canonical hierarchy. The same logic extends in both directions, and our True Opens indicator draws three more for completeness:
- Nano — finer than Micro (a ~5.6-minute quarter), most conventionally read on a 15-second chart. A natural extension downward for scalpers.
- Quadrennial — a four-year cycle whose quarters are years (it lines up with the US election / leap-year rhythm).
- Generational — a 16-year cycle. This one is an experimental extension with no basis in Daye's framework — we include it only so the highest timeframes still have a few cycles to read. Treat it as a curiosity, not doctrine.
Put it on your chart
Reading premium and discount by eye gets old fast. Our QS True Opens indicator plots the whole hierarchy automatically — every cycle's Q2 open, coloured for premium/discount, on the correct New York clock with daylight saving handled. It's the fastest way to start seeing the bias the way Quarterly Theory describes it.
Quarter Sequence provides charting tools and indicators, and teaches a framework — not financial advice, signals, or any promise of profit. Trading futures carries substantial risk of loss.