Marking support after a gap on the Seoul open

The cash session in Seoul begins at 09:00. Some mornings the first prints sit well away from the previous close, and the chart shows a hole. That hole tempts people to declare yesterday’s shelf support, or to treat the empty space itself as a zone. Neither choice is automatic.

The untraded space is a note, not a band

A zone, in the way we teach it, comes from traded reactions: wicks and closes that turned. Prices inside a gap were not traded in the cash session. We write the gap on the sheet as a vertical note — from the prior close to the first burst of prints — and we leave it unshaded. Shading it would pretend that turns happened where no bars exist.

Yesterday’s shelf can still matter, but only as the zone it already was, owned by whatever swing created it. The gap does not promote it, and it does not cancel it. If price never returns, the shelf simply goes untested. An untested zone stays on the map with its original swing name. We do not move it up to the edge of the gap to make it feel relevant.

The first fifteen minutes stay unmarked

On a private-desk morning we leave the opening burst alone. The first prints are often a single push to find the other side of the overnight imbalance. Marking support off that burst produces a zone owned by noise. We wait until there is a swing we can point at, which on a 5-minute sheet is rarely there before the first quarter hour has finished. The pencil stays on the tray.

After that, if price reacts and the reaction has a high and a low we can name, we mark a small opening zone on the intraday sheet only. It does not migrate onto the daily sheet. Daily zones are built from daily swings. An opening wiggle does not become daily support because it happened at 09:20.

When the gap fills

If later trade walks back through the hole and starts turning inside yesterday’s range, we mark those turns in the ordinary way. The gap note remains, with the time it was filled written beside it. Filling a gap is a description of where trade returned. It is not, by itself, a new swing. We still ask the same question we ask on any other day: which high or low owns this band?

Sittings that practice this kind of markup are listed under desk hours.