Trading the London Open with Order Blocks: A Simple 3-Step Routine

The first 90 minutes of the London session are, for many FX and gold traders, the best window of the day: spreads tighten, volume arrives, and the overnight range finally resolves into a direction. They are also where a lot of retail losses happen — because the classic mistake is to wait for the move, watch the first big candle, and chase it.

This post describes a simple, mechanical routine for preparing the London open with order blocks. It takes about ten minutes before the session and gives you two or three pre-defined places to act, instead of reacting to candles. Nothing here requires an indicator — you can do all of it by hand. At the end I'll show how I automate the drawing part.

What is an order block, in plain English?

An order block is the last opposite-colored candle before a strong move that breaks structure. Before a big impulse up there is almost always one final bearish candle — that is where the last sellers got trapped and where large buy orders were filled. When price returns to that area later, it often reacts.

The definition I use is deliberately strict:

• A bearish candle becomes a demand zone only if its high is broken upward within the next few bars by a real impulse — and I measure "real" as a displacement of at least 1x ATR.
• A bullish candle becomes a supply zone the same way, mirrored down.
• If price later closes through the far side of the zone, the zone is dead and should come off the chart.

The ATR filter matters. Without it you will mark every small pullback as an "order block" and your chart becomes wallpaper. With it, only the moves with genuine displacement — the footprints of size — survive.

Step 1 — Frame the Asian range

From roughly 00:00 to 07:00 server time, most FX pairs and gold build an accumulation range. Mark the Asian high and low. This range is the fuel: stops accumulate above the high and below the low, and London's first job is very often to collect them.

Don't trade the range itself. Its only job in this routine is to tell you where the liquidity is.

Step 2 — Mark the fresh order blocks on H1

Switch to H1 and look back over the last one or two days. Find the impulses — the moves that clearly broke a swing high or low — and mark the last opposite candle before each one. You will usually end up with one or two demand zones below current price and one or two supply zones above.

Two quality checks before you keep a zone:

• Fresh only. If price has already returned to the zone and bounced once, the orders there are partially spent. A fresh, untested zone deserves bold treatment; a retested one deserves less trust.
• Displacement. The impulse leaving the zone should be tall and fast relative to ATR. If you have to squint to see the break, it isn't one.

Step 3 — Let London sweep, then trade the return

Now the actual plan. At the open, London very often does one of two things first: it runs the Asian high or low, collecting the stops — or it drives straight into the nearest H1 zone.

The setup worth waiting for is the combination:

1. Price sweeps Asian liquidity (takes out the high or the low),
2. then reaches a fresh H1 order block,
3. and reacts there on M15 — a rejection wick, an engulfing bar back inside the range, any sign the zone is being defended.

That sequence — sweep, tap, reaction — is the whole routine. You are not predicting the direction of the day; you are letting the session's first move show you which zone is being defended, and joining from a level where your stop is small and obvious: just beyond the far edge of the zone.

If price reaches the zone and closes through it instead, the zone is broken. No trade. Delete it and move on. A dead zone left on the chart is how you talk yourself into a bad entry.

What not to do

• Don't trade the first five-minute candle of the session. Let the sweep happen.
• Don't use stale zones from a week ago. London cares about recent footprints.
• Don't widen your stop "a little" when the zone starts failing. The far edge of the zone is the invalidation — that is the entire point of entering at a level.

Automating the drawing part

Everything above can be done manually, and it is worth doing by hand for a week — it builds the eye. The part that gets tedious is maintenance: re-scanning H1 every morning, checking which zones are still fresh, fading the ones that were touched, deleting the ones that broke.

That is the part I automated. Order Block Zones (free) draws exactly the zones described here — last opposite candle, ATR-measured displacement, structure break — and then manages them: fresh zones are bold with a bright edge line, wick-touched zones fade to mitigated, and zones broken on a close are removed automatically. The panel shows the nearest supply above and demand below with distances in points, which is convenient for the pre-London check.

The Pro version adds a higher-timeframe overlay (H1/H4 zones visible while you execute on M15) and touch alerts, which is how you can monitor the open without staring at the chart. But the free version contains the full zone engine — start there.

If you try the routine and something in the zone logic doesn't match what you see on your broker's feed, post a comment on the product page — I read everything and usually reply within a day.