11 November 2025
Reading the first hour on ASX blue chips
How opening auctions, gap fills, and early volume spikes reshape the day’s bias before lunch.
The opening auction on liquid ASX names often prints a range that looks decisive and then fails within thirty minutes. Watching only the candle body misses the auction imbalance that formed overnight.
Start by marking the prior day’s high, low, and close. If the open sits outside that range, treat the first fifteen minutes as information, not an entry. Volume relative to the previous ten opens tells you whether the move has sponsorship or is simply overnight order noise.
Gap fills are common on mid-caps after earnings headlines. A clean fill back into the prior close with declining volume often resets the session to a range day. Aggressive continuation after a fill usually needs a second wave of volume above the first hour’s high.
Keep a one-page log for five sessions: open relative to prior range, first-hour high/low, and whether the close held the early bias. Patterns in that log matter more than any single textbook formation.