Peering into daily bars

A daily bar keeps four prices from a day that had a structure of its own: an overnight session before it, a morning and an afternoon, a moment when the high was made and another when the low was. Most backtests stop at the four prices, but the short-term trading literature mostly doesn’t, and if you read the classic swing-trading rules closely, then you find them asking questions a daily bar can’t answer. Was yesterday’s low tested in the morning or in the afternoon? What did the first hour do, how did the last hour close, and how far had the market got by noon?

Linda Bradford Raschke’s work is the richest single source of those rules. She’s about as plain a case of a daily-bar trader as you’ll find: her best-known patterns come from daily charts, and in Trading Sardines she describes her main futures book as “in one day, out the next”, with trades that last one to three days. Yet most of her rules are about what happens inside the day, and they sit alongside older ideas that ask the same kind of question, such as George Douglas Taylor’s buy and sell days, the Moore Research studies printed in Street Smarts, Toby Crabel’s work on the opening bar, and Jim Dalton’s reading of a day as a sequence of regional sessions.

Most of the statistics behind those rules come from the pit-traded markets of the early 1990s. So we set them against 4,065 trading days of E-mini S&P 500 futures, minute by minute, from June 2010 to the end of September 2026, to see which of the things they read inside a bar are still there and which of the trading edges built on them have survived. The descriptive facts mostly have survived, while most of the edges have gone, and the reasons say a good deal about what a daily-bar backtest can see.

Where the rules come from

Short-term trading rules travel a long way from their sources, often under the wrong name, so before testing any of them it pays to check who said what. The best-known example here is a post titled “Market Wizard Linda Raschke’s 12 Technical Trading Rules”, which has been circulating since at least 2015. When we traced each rule back, several turned out to be fair paraphrases of things she teaches, but two have no support in anything she wrote that we could find. One says larger gaps mean better odds of continuation, when her own gap work leans the other way, and the other says more of the day’s range happens in the first hour than it used to. (We tested both anyway, and the answers are further down.) The list ends with a famous paragraph, “nobody has the foggiest notion of what will happen in the future. Mark that word – Nobody!”, which is Max Gunther’s, from The Zurich Axioms (1985), with “speculator” quietly changed to “trader”.

Books need the same care, since Street Smarts (1995) was written by Raschke and Larry Connors together and some of its setups are his. Turtle Soup is the usual example: in the book’s own Q&A she asks him, “Larry, how did you come up with the Turtle Soup strategy?”, and in a 2025 interview she remembered it more as a shared joke from the writing of the book (the Turtles’ 20-day breakouts were famous, “so we’re like, well, when that fails, it’s turtle soup”), adding that “none of it’s copyrighted or trademarked”.

So every rule below is credited to the place it appears. The sources are Street Smarts, in the chapters written in Raschke’s voice or the setups the two authors present together, along with its Moore Research appendix; Raschke’s own Trading Sardines (2019) and her 2001 article “Tape Reading”; two print interviews with her, Thom Hartle’s for Stocks & Commodities in 1993 and Mark Etzkorn’s for Active Trader in 2004; and video interviews from 2016 to 2026 (Chat With Traders, Edgewonk, Words of Rizdom, and the Crowded Market Report), quoted from cleaned-up auto-captions and only where the sense is clear.

What the four numbers already tell you

Before you look inside a bar at all, its geometry says a good deal, and several well-known setups are built from nothing else.

Where the open and close sit in the range. A Moore Research study in the appendix of Street Smarts found that when the S&P closed in the top 10% of its daily range (17% of the 2,436 days tested), the next day traded above that day’s high 85% of the time but closed higher only 50% of the time, so the market tended to follow through in the morning and then turn. Derek Gipson, a trader friend of Raschke’s, noticed that the reversal was even more likely when the setup day had opened at the opposite end of its range, and that became the 80-20 bar: a day that opens in its top 20% and closes in its bottom 20%. The next day you wait for the market to trade 5–15 ticks below that low, then buy on a stop back at it, and the trade is “a day trade only”.

How wide the range was compared with recent days. A bar that is the narrowest of the last four (NR4) or seven (NR7), or an inside day, marks contraction, while the widest range of the last seven (WR7) marks expansion. The same appendix found that after a WR7 day most markets closed in the opposite direction the next day, which is why the money-management chapter of Street Smarts says to take profits on a range-expansion bar. In Raschke’s words the market “alternates between range expansion and range contraction”, one of her four principles of price behaviour. She still lists NR7, volatility breakouts, and the outside day followed by an inside day among the structures she watches, and in 2026 she called the outside-inside pattern “probably one of the most powerful breakout formations”.

Where the open sits relative to yesterday. In the Street Smarts gap setups, a gap means today’s open measured against yesterday’s range, and several of them need the open to be below yesterday’s low, which is a stricter test than opening below yesterday’s close.

All of that can be read from four numbers, and we found the same structure in our own data in The lie hidden inside daily bars . Over 16 years of ES, where the open sits in the day’s range is a strong clue to which extreme came first: on days that opened in the bottom decile of their range, the low came first 98% of the time, the same held in reverse at the top, and in the middle it was a coin flip. Raschke defines a trend day as one that “opens on one end of its range and closes on the opposite end, has range expansion, and makes a steady pattern of higher highs and higher lows”, which describes the same days our measurement picked out. But geometry only takes you so far, because the rules keep pointing at times of day.

The day has a clock

The morning tests, the afternoon confirms

George Douglas Taylor’s The Taylor Trading Technique treats the market as a rhythm of buy days, sell days, and sell-short days, and Raschke still uses it. Street Smarts boils it down to the part that matters: “In the morning, a buy day should find support at the previous day’s low.” That morning test defines your risk when you buy, and after that “the market should not make new lows in the afternoon after we bought it”. If the day closes above its open, you carry the trade overnight and look to sell it the next day above the entry day’s high. A sell-short day is the mirror image, where “the market should make its highs first in the morning”.

If you read that as a daily-bar trader, then the thing to notice is that every condition depends on when the low and the high were made as well as where they were. A daily bar can tell you that today’s low was near yesterday’s low, but it can’t tell you whether that happened at 9:45 or 3:45, and that’s the difference between a buy day and a failed one.

The first hour and the last

The same split between early and late trading runs through the Street Smarts chapter on the Smart Money Index, whose thesis is that “weak hands (i.e., the public) tend to make emotional, uninformed decisions in the first hour of trading. The professionals represent the smart money and control the last hour of trading.” The index adds the inverted first-hour change to the last-hour change, and each day’s reading becomes a bias for the next. The practical advice that follows needs no index at all: “if you are long and the market closes firm, carry your position home overnight. There are overwhelming odds that the market will follow-through the next morning. Also, be especially on guard against making emotional mistakes in the first hour of trading.”

Raschke said the same about her own trading in 1993: “The last hour’s action is very important to me. I want to see how a market’s going to perform at the end of the day, and if I like how it acts at the end of the day I will continue to carry the trade.” Whiplash, another Street Smarts gap setup, depends on the same contrast. You want “days when a gap in the morning is followed by a reversal in the afternoon. This reversal tends to follow-through the next morning and often for the next few days.” The entry is on the close, because “we want confirmation that the market has truly failed”.

The first 30 minutes

By 2004 Raschke was less interested in where the close sat as such. “I don’t care that much about a day that closed on its high or low. I’m more interested in how the market behaves after the first 30 minutes of trading. A lot of the pension funds and institutions tend to stand back a little in the first 30 minutes and watch the market settle in to get some confirmation.” She went on: “I want to see a degree of trendiness between say, 10 and 10:30 or 10:45 a.m. I want to see a steady pattern of higher highs and higher lows after 10 o’clock. If I see that pattern I know it will appear in the afternoon, too.” In the same interview she said bull and bear flags work best between 10:00 and 11:30 am and between 2:00 and 3:00 pm, “because that’s when institutions are most active”.

The idea underneath is that the day has segments with different participants, and some of them carry more information than others: the first half-hour is noisy, the late morning shows whether a trend has real sponsorship, and the last hour shows who is still willing to hold risk overnight. It survives in the drill Raschke gives beginners twenty years on, which is to watch “the morning trend 30 minutes after the NYSE has opened until Europe closes”, and in her use of the Asian, European, and American sessions, by way of Jim Dalton’s Mind Over Markets, to read how a day unfolds.

She has also become warier of the classic patterns. In a 2026 interview she said “there’s so much noise in the markets now. These traditional chart formations have a lower frequency of successful breakouts”, and that she prefers “the most visible chart points, swing highs and swing lows”. She treats technical analysis as a way to find where the market “shouldn’t go”, which for her makes it mainly a risk tool.

Reference points that come from yesterday

Raschke’s 2001 article “Tape Reading” is the clearest statement of which price levels a short-term trader should carry around. “An astute trader will always have the previous day’s close in his head. He also knows the previous day’s high and low… He also knows the opening price, for that tells if the buyers or sellers are in control for the day.” And: “The previous day’s high and low and today’s open have very strong psychological implications and are the most important ‘pivot points’ to recognize.”

She’s specific about how those levels behave in different conditions. “The previous day’s high and low tend to overlap in congestion areas. Look to exit profitable trades immediately at these points in sideways markets. In trending markets, the price will run through these points a bit before pausing. When the market is strongly trending, the opening price becomes the most important.”

She has no use for calculated pivots, and in 2004 she said she never uses “Fibonacci numbers, Gann retracements, artificial pivot points or other things like that because I’ve never found any edge or any statistical significance from testing them”. The levels that matter in this tradition are ones every participant can see, and what counts is how price behaves when it reaches them, which plays out inside the day.

The morning as a trigger

A common pattern in these rules is a daily condition that makes a move possible, with something early in the next session confirming or cancelling it.

Momentum Pinball. The daily chart supplies the setup, a 3-period RSI of the one-day net change below 30 (or above 70 for shorts). The entry comes from the next day’s first hour, with a buy stop above the first hour’s high and the protective stop at the first hour’s low (“the market should not come back to this point”). A profitable trade is carried overnight and exited on the next morning’s follow-through. In Street Smarts Raschke calls it “one of my most consistent trading patterns”.

The day after an NR7. From her 2004 interview: “Something I’ll almost always do the day after an NR7 day is bracket stops around the early morning range. When I tested this out about five years ago, it didn’t matter whether you bracketed the first 45 minutes range or the first hour’s range. If there’s going to be a trend day, you’re going to catch it.” Trading Sardines says what to do with a trend day once you’re in it: “get long, stay long, and scalp every continuation pattern. Exit on the close.”

The opening bar. To tell whether a trend day is under way, Raschke cites Toby Crabel’s test of a very large opening 15-minute bar, larger than the opening 15-minute bars of the past several days. “Sometimes the market will open with a big bar down or up, and you know to just go for it.”

The unfilled gap. Trading Sardines notes that if a market opens with a large gap, a model might expect price to trade back into the gap. “However, if this does not occur during the next three trading hours, the model suggests the market has better odds to trade in the direction of the initial gap.” Raschke’s “burning dog” study of S&P gaps adds a time-of-day twist: “If the burning dog did not get its 4 points by noon, there were higher odds the market would make new highs or lows in the afternoon.”

What 16 years of ES say now

Raschke told Chat With Traders in 2016 that edges die, and that you either adapt or change the product. In 2025 she said “the markets are always changing” and that people should test ideas themselves, “because people don’t do their own testing, but it’s very important to model these things”, so that’s what we did.

How we tested it

The data is a back-adjusted continuous front-month ES series for every trading day from 7 June 2010 to 30 September 2026, built from CME Globex one-minute bars in our marketfeed archive. The day session is the old pit session, 08:30 to 15:15 Chicago (09:30 to 16:15 New York), which is what the day-session statistics in these sources were built on, and half days are dropped. That leaves 4,065 days, which we also split into two halves, 2010–17 and 2018–26, to see whether anything has drifted.

Before using the bars, we checked them against the archive’s own session reader, which builds the same window from one-second data. Every open matched, and so did every high and low except three. The closes differ on about a quarter of days by a tick or two, because the archive’s window includes trades stamped at exactly 15:15:00 and ours stops just before; neither choice changes any result below.

Points are ES index points (one point is $50 a contract), and P&L is before commission and slippage, which for a round trip in ES is worth something like half a point. The average day-session range was 16.5 points in 2010–17 and 51.3 points in 2018–26, so point figures from the two halves aren’t directly comparable. Where it matters we also give results in multiples of the 20-day average range, and the t-statistic is there to separate signal from noise (anything under about 2 is noise).

The scorecard

The pattern is fairly consistent: the descriptive facts these rules relied on, such as where the follow-through happens and how volume tracks range, are still true on ES, while the trading edges built on them have mostly gone, several of them since 2018, which fits Raschke’s own 2026 remark about noise and lower breakout success rates rather well.

The close and the next morning

The Moore Research numbers have aged better than anything else. On ES since 2010, 16.2% of days close in the top 10% of their day-session range (Moore had 17%), and the next day session trades above that day’s high 79% of the time (Moore had 85%). The difference is the overnight session, which barely existed for the S&P in the early 1990s: today the overnight takes out the high 86% of the time on its own, and 92% of the time either the overnight or the next day session does.

The next close, meanwhile, is higher 54.6% of the time, which is just ES’s usual upward drift (55.0% of all days). The original observation, follow-through in the morning and then a turn, is still exactly right; the morning has simply moved to Asia.

The firm-close rule holds up in the same way. If the last hour is up and the day closes in its top quarter, then the next morning (overnight plus the first hour) trades above today’s high 83.5% of the time, well above the 52% for any day and above the 71.6% for days that close in the top quarter after a falling last hour, so the last hour does add something. But the gap from the close to the next day-session open averages +0.14 points after a firm close, against +0.83 for all days, so the follow-through is something to sell into, and the overnight hold itself earns less than an average night does.

The Smart Money Index has nothing left to offer. The next day was up 54.6% of the time after the index rose and 56.3% after it fell, neither the first hour nor the last hour on its own says anything about the next close, and the rank correlations are all within 0.04 of zero.

Ranges cluster

Ranges do expand after an NR7 more often than not, but mostly because an NR7 is narrow by definition. The next day is still 15% narrower than average, and a WR7 day is usually followed by another wide one. On ES quiet follows quiet and busy follows busy, which is the volatility clustering that every options desk prices, and “alternates” is the wrong word for it.

That’s why the NR7 bracket disappoints: the day after an NR7 produced a trend day (opening in one 20% end, closing in the other, on a range at least as wide as the 20-day average) 9.4% of the time, against 11.6% for all days. We bracketed the first 45 minutes, took the first breakout with a stop at the other side, and got out on the close. Over the whole period that made +1.4 points a trade (t 1.9); it lost money in 2010–17 and made +3.0 points (t 2.2) in 2018–26, which is +0.12 of the risk taken, while the same bracket on every day made nothing. There’s a faint recent signal, and it’s well short of “you’re going to catch it”.

The outside day followed by an inside day came up 88 times in 16 years. Bracketing the inside day’s range the next session lost 1.4 points a trade (t −0.5), and the next day’s range was above average 45.5% of the time, against 41.4% for any day. That’s too few trades to condemn it, and there’s nothing in them to recommend it either.

Crabel’s opening bar does a little better: when the first 15 minutes are wider than any of the previous five days’ first 15 minutes (16.3% of days), 15.3% of those days are trend days against 11.6% on average, and the day closes in the opening bar’s direction 65.9% of the time against 61.4%, an effect that’s real but modest and holds in both halves.

The morning, the afternoon, and the clock

The 2004 claim that trendiness after 10:00 ET carries into the afternoon doesn’t survive. The correlation between the 10:00–10:45 move and the move from 10:45 to the close is −0.003, and they share a sign 50.3% of the time; the beginner drill’s window, 10:00 to the European close at 11:30, does no better (correlation −0.009).

If the 15-minute bars from 09:45 to 10:45 form a clean staircase of higher highs and higher lows, then the afternoon does make a new high for the day 67.9% of the time (52.4% on average), but it closes the afternoon higher only 53.3% of the time, which is less than the 54.6% for any day. Down staircases are worse: the afternoon falls only 39.3% of the time, so a clean morning decline is more often bought than extended.

The sense of when things happen holds up far better than the sense of what they predict.

More than half of all highs and lows are made in the first 30 minutes or the last 75, and 71% of days make at least one extreme in the first hour. Volume between 10:00 and 11:30 runs at nearly twice the midday rate, as Raschke said, while the 2:00–3:00 pm window she liked for flags is barely busier than lunch, and the real afternoon activity comes after 3:30. As for the claim wrongly attributed to her, that more of the day’s range happens in the first hour than it used to, the first hour’s share of the day’s range has wandered between 49% and 60% a year since 2010 with no trend at all.

Taylor’s buy day turns into something more ordinary when you count it. A morning test of yesterday’s low (a low before noon within 10% of yesterday’s range of yesterday’s low) happens on 9.4% of days, and the afternoon holds above it about half the time. Days that hold close above their open 78.5% of the time, but that’s close to tautological, since the day’s low is already behind them. The useful part is the next day, which trades above the buy day’s high 66.7% of the time, a little less often than the 69.4% for any day that closed above its open, so the test of yesterday’s low adds nothing the up close hadn’t already told you.

Setups that no longer pay

The 80-20 reversal made +4.2 points a trade (t 2.8) in 2010–17, which was a real edge, and +0.6 (t 0.2) since. The sell version, after a day that opened at its low and closed at its high, never worked on ES. Whiplash, buying the close after a gap below yesterday’s low reverses, made +2.2 points to the next close, against +1.5 for buying every close, and the sell side lost money.

The clearest failure of the lot is Momentum Pinball. Buying a first-hour breakout the day after LBR/RSI falls below 30 lost 3.1 points a trade (t −2.8), and 5.4 points (t −3.0) since 2018, against +1.0 for the same trade taken every day. (The stop sat at the first hour’s low, and a profitable trade was held to the next open.) On today’s ES, three days of steepening losses are more often followed by a failed rally out of the first hour than a successful one, while the short side, after RSI above 70, was flat.

Of gaps of at least a quarter of an average day’s range that are still open three hours in, 63.3% close beyond the open in the gap’s direction (against 22.6% for gaps that did fill), but most of that move has already happened by 12:30 ET. From then to the close the market moved in the gap’s direction 50.9% of the time, which is no help to anyone deciding at the three-hour mark. On the other rule wrongly credited to Raschke, ES is mildly on its side: gaps of at least half an average range closed beyond the open in the gap’s direction 52.6% of the time, against 46.3% for the smallest gaps.

Yesterday’s high and low behave the other way round from the “Tape Reading” description. When ES traded through yesterday’s extreme in a congested market (the bottom third by 10-day efficiency ratio), it closed back inside 39.1% of the time; in a trending market, breaking in the trend’s direction, it closed back inside 42.8% of the time. On ES a congestion-area extreme is, if anything, a slightly worse place to take profits.

Turtle Soup, and what a daily bar hides

Turtle Soup is the best illustration of why all this matters to anyone testing on daily bars. The Street Smarts rules, as usually restated, are these: today makes a new 20-day low, the previous 20-day low is at least four sessions old, and once price has broken it you buy on a stop just above the old low, with a stop just under today’s low. In 2025 Raschke said that when you test it, “the longevity of that signal is about one day”, and that you “might get” a bigger reversal “one out of every four times”.

On ES the honest version is worse than that: of 91 filled buys, 86% were stopped out the same day, because the day’s low at the moment of entry is usually only a few ticks below the old low and ES revisits it. The average trade lost 1.8 points by the first close (t −1.8), 12% were winners at that point, and 10% ever ran an average day’s range in their favour within five sessions. Sells were stopped out the same day 74% of the time and were down 1.1 points after five sessions.

A daily-bar backtest of the same rules tells a different story. It sees a bar that traded below the old low and back above it, so it assumes the fill, and it puts the stop under the day’s final low, which by construction can’t be hit that day. On that view 46% of the buys are winners at the first close, nearly four times the honest figure, and the difference comes entirely from the order of events inside the entry day, which the daily bar doesn’t record. (Even the flattering version doesn’t make money with any confidence on ES: +3.0 points after five sessions, with a t of 0.4.)

Volume, and day three

In 2025 Raschke said “volume is highly correlated with the range of the bar, and volume is also highly dependent on time-of-day functionality”, and that a trader’s job is to strip such redundancies away. On ES the correlation between a day’s volume and its range, each taken relative to its own 20-day average, is 0.78 in both halves of the sample, so volume adds little to a range you can already see.

Her example of model homework was “the market has been up two days in a row, what tends to happen on day three?” On ES, not much: after two up days the third was up 54.9% of the time, against 55.6% for any day. After three down days it was up 59.5% of the time (326 cases), which is the closest thing to a usable observation in this section, but still a weak one.

What this means if you only trade daily bars

None of this is a reason for a daily-bar trader to start day trading, and Raschke warned against it in 1993: “Mostly, I watch price. I find that if I want to buy, I’m buying because of some daily setup, and if I start looking at five minute charts or 30-minute charts, it might influence me the wrong way.” The tradition takes the decision from the daily chart and the timing from the day’s price action, without letting intraday noise talk the trader out of the setup. For a systematic trader that splits into four practical points.

1. A handful of intraday facts per day is enough

Almost every rule above can be written as a function of a few per-day features, so you can use intraday information while still trading from daily bars:

• the first hour’s high and low, and the first 15-minute bar’s range;
• the net change over the first hour and over the last hour;
• the time of day at which the high and the low were made;
• the day-session open, high, low, and close, kept separate from the overnight session;
• where the open and close sat within the day’s range.

If you store those alongside each daily bar, then the Taylor buy day, the Smart Money Index, Momentum Pinball, and the NR7 bracket all become testable from a daily-frequency dataset, and without them none of them is. That’s how every test above was run, and for most of them the edge has gone, which you’d rather find out before building a system on one.

2. A daily backtest can’t see the order of events

Many of these entries are conditional on a sequence, where price trades below a level and then comes back above it. A daily-bar engine with a resting buy stop above that level will fill the order on any day that trades through it, whether or not the market went below first. That’s the OHLC path problem in another form, and it flatters these strategies in the same way, because the engine books the version of the day that suits the trade. Turtle Soup is a worked example: 46% winners on daily bars, and 12% once the stop is placed where the rules put it.

Rules that enter “on the close” have the opposite problem. Whiplash wants a close above the open and in the top half of the day’s range, and the Street Smarts 2-period rate-of-change method wants you “long by the close if the price is trading above this pivot point”. If your engine decides using today’s close and then fills at today’s close, then it has looked ahead. A discretionary trader would decide in the last few minutes of the session using the price at that moment, so the honest backtest decides on a bar that ends shortly before the close and accepts the small difference.

3. Day-session ranges and 23-hour ranges are different bars

Street Smarts says more than once that “night sessions are omitted” and that the range “should be created from day-session data only”. Most continuous futures daily bars you can buy today are built from the near-24-hour electronic session, and on ES that changes the classifications more than you’d expect.

The open changes most of all, since the day session opens outside yesterday’s day-session range on 40% of days, while the 23-hour session opens outside its previous range on only 5.5%, mostly after weekends.

When the day session opens below yesterday’s low, the overnight market had already crossed that low first, every single time: in the evening Chicago hours (Asia) on 59.5% of those days, between midnight and 07:00 on 31%, and in the 90 minutes before the open on 9%. A gap below yesterday’s low in 1995 was news arriving at the open, and on today’s ES it’s a continuation of overnight trade. If you test these setups on 23-hour bars, then you’re testing a different rule, and where your bars come from decides which one.

4. Time-based exits travel well

Trading Sardines says “much of my modeling uses time-based exits. Exit on the close or the next day’s close, Exit after one hour… Time-based exits are not dependent on the range or volatility conditions, and they are robust.” The money-management chapter of Street Smarts makes the same point another way: “the way to minimize risk is to be in the market the shortest amount of time”. Raschke repeated it in 2026, telling newer traders that “the longer you have a position on in the marketplace, you’re assuming more risk”.

A daily-bar trader can use that straight away, since “exit on the next day’s close” or “exit if not profitable within two days” needs no intraday data and removes a lot of the path ambiguity that price-based exits suffer from. Every result above that held up (the follow-through above a strong close, the extension after a big opening bar) is something a time-based exit can capture.

Caveats

The statistics in these sources are mostly from the early 1990s, many of them on pit-traded futures, and Raschke herself notes that things have changed: “Ticks and Trin are less critical than they were in the eighties and nineties… This changed when stocks went to decimalization in 2001. Also, market internals, as well as indicators or time of day functions, work best when there is heavier volume.” We tested one market, ES, from 2010 onwards, and other markets may well tell a different story, as might the 1990s themselves, when the S&P was a larger contract with a pit session and a much smaller overnight market.

None of these sources presents its rules as a mechanical system, and Street Smarts says so in its introduction: “None of these strategies is designed to be a mechanical system.” The appendix calls its studies “tendencies” and says plainly that they aren’t trading results, and in interviews Raschke describes her models as preparation for a discretionary decision that she makes herself.

Any test of these rules involves choices their authors didn’t make, such as what counts as a test of yesterday’s low, how many ticks is “near”, and when the morning ends. We made those choices once and didn’t tune them afterwards. Different reasonable choices would move some numbers by a few points, and probably wouldn’t rescue the setups that came out negative.

Raschke would be the least surprised person to read any of this. “My trading program really has not varied in 45 years”, she said in 2025, yet in the same breath she listed adaptability as the last trait a successful trader needs, and in 2016 she described markets as Darwinian, with edges that die. What we found on ES is that the structure inside the daily bar these rules describe is still there, while most of the specific ways of trading it have been competed away. The next step is to run the same tests on other markets.

Sources

• Linda Bradford Raschke and Laurence A. Connors, Street Smarts: High Probability Short-Term Trading Strategies (M. Gordon Publishing, 1995). Chapters 2–3 (swing trading and money management), 6 (80-20s), 7 (Momentum Pinball), 8 (2-period ROC and Taylor), 12 (Whiplash), 19–20 (range contraction), 21 (Smart Money Index), and the Moore Research appendix.
• Linda Bradford Raschke, Trading Sardines: Lessons in the Markets from a Lifelong Trader (2019). Chapters 14, 15, 33, and 34.
• Linda Bradford Raschke, “Tape Reading” (MRCI and LBR Group, 2001).
• Thom Hartle, “The Discerning Trader: Linda Bradford Raschke”, Technical Analysis of Stocks & Commodities 11:9 (1993).
• Mark Etzkorn, “Linda Raschke” (interview), Active Trader, February 2004.
• Chat With Traders, episode 48, “Interview with ‘Market Wizard’ and hedge fund veteran, Linda Bradford Raschke” (April 2016), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l6fWeiwwjOI .
• Edgewonk, “Linda Raschke shares trading tips from 45 years of trading and being a hedge fund trader” (March 2025), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WILZABEsY5w .
• Words of Rizdom, “Linda Raschke - She MASTERED Trading” (March 2025), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RSAEh1qKjxo .
• Crowded Market Report, “Masterclass with Linda Raschke” (March 2026), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=czdJYn9mCEg .
• Max Gunther, The Zurich Axioms (1985), for the paragraph wrongly attributed to Raschke.
• George Douglas Taylor, The Taylor Trading Technique, Toby Crabel’s opening-bar work, and Jim Dalton’s Mind Over Markets are cited here as they appear in Raschke’s books and interviews.
• Data: CME Globex ES one-minute bars (Databento), 7 June 2010 to 30 September 2026, from the marketfeed archive.