Is anyone else noticing manipulation in open London?

A lot of theory and a little graphic. Why don’t you go up captures with the movements you say are manipulation? So you can analyze something useful.

Good idea. Here I leave a catch of GBPUSD this morning. Just at 9:01 he made a brutal wick of 25 pips and returned to the starting point in 3 minutes. Is that noise or sweep?

Confirmed. I did the same with EURJPY. It was as if they swept the SLs just above the Asian maximum and then... total reverse. Very clear manipulation for me.

Hey, and won't it be better to avoid operating right at that time? Sometimes the best trade is not to enter. In my case, I put alerts and wait for the reaction. If there is real intention, I come in later.

That's the key. I use a rule: if the price makes a wick above 15 pips in less than 2 minutes, I don't operate in the next 10 times. That saved me many times from open London chaos.

The behaviour of the market during the opening of London is not new, but increasingly sophisticated. The concept of "handling" is often misunderstood: it does not necessarily imply that there is a malevolent entity behind it, but movements obey the logic of liquidity capture. Large institutional operators need volume to execute their orders, and the most efficient way to achieve it is to provoke artificial movement that triggers stops and hasty entries of retail operators. During the first few minutes of London, the market usually reacts to the pending orders accumulated since the Asian session. That’s where the perfect conditions are created for what some call "fakeouts" or "traps." That’s why, more than avoiding that time, it is advisable to understand it: to observe how the main pairs behave, detect the liquidity zones, and see if the price returns to them after the initial spy. That subsequent reaction is usually more reliable to find an entry. One tool that has significantly improved my analysis in that time slot is the volume comparison between sessions. Measure the delta between the Asian opening and the London opening allows to anticipate when a movement has real intention, or only lower noise5.

Thank you for taking the time to write this, very useful and well structured.

Interesting approach, but I still think operating at that time is a Russian roulette.

Really, thank you for sharing so much detail. You gave me a new way of looking at that time slot.

Don't you think you're overanalyzing? Sometimes a simple mobile media works better than all that.