How to determine your bias for the day

Most people don't lose money because their entry was bad. They lose because they took a perfect long setup on a day that was only ever going down. Entry is maybe 20% of the trade. Direction is the other 80%, and almost nobody works on it.

This is the routine I run before every session. It takes about fifteen minutes, it's the same steps every day, and it produces exactly one sentence.

That sentence is your bias. Everything below builds to it.

What bias actually is

Three things get confused constantly, and the confusion is expensive.

	What it is	Timeframe
Bias	The direction you're willing to trade today	The session
Setup	The pattern that gives you an entry	Minutes
Prediction	Guessing where price closes	Useless

Three rules follow from that, and these are the ones that actually change how you trade.

• Rule 1 Bias is a filter, not a signal It never tells you to buy. It tells you which sells to ignore. That's a smaller job than people expect, and it's why bias alone doesn't make you money — it stops you losing it on the wrong side.
• Rule 2 Bias has an expiry You're not calling the next 24 hours. You're calling the New York AM window — 7:00 to 9:30 PM IST. A bias without an expiry is just a bag you'll end up holding all day.
• Rule 3 "No bias" is a real answer Roughly a third of days don't deserve a directional opinion. Spotting those is a skill, not a failure. On a no-bias day you stand down or you cut size — and standing down is the harder of the two.

Step 1 & 2 — Context, then the draw

Start on the daily. Mark the most recent clean swing high and swing low. Everything above the midpoint of that range is expensive; everything below is cheap. You want to be buying cheap and selling expensive relative to that range — not chasing whatever just moved.

Then find the draw. Price moves from one pool of resting orders to the next, so your job is to spot the nearest obvious pool that hasn't been touched yet.

Which pools count, roughly strongest first:

Previous week high / low

strongest

Previous day high / low

the workhorse

Equal highs or equal lows

clusters of stops

Overnight (Asia) high / low

session-level

Unfilled imbalances on 1H / 4H

weakest of the set

Step 3 — The mark-up

Same six levels, same order, every single day. Six is the limit. If your chart has thirty levels on it you don't have a bias, you have a wall.

1 · PDH / PDL

previous day high and low

2 · PWH / PWL

previous week high and low

3 · Asia range

high and low

4 · London range

high and low

5 · Midnight NY open

one horizontal line

6 · Unfilled gaps

on the 1H

Those sessions land at awkward hours from India, so it's worth having the clock in your head rather than working it out each morning.

Step 4 — Read the sequence

The day tells you its story before New York opens, if you know what to look at.

Asia builds a tight overnight range on low volume. That range is usually the fuel. London very often runs one side of it — takes the liquidity, then reverses. That first move is frequently a fake-out rather than the real direction. New York is where the actual expansion happens.

Levels to mark6

Bias windowNY AM

Flips per day, max1

Days with no bias~1 in 3

Price Asia range The sweep

Turning bias into an actual trade

• Timing Decide before the session, execute during it Bias is set before New York opens. Once it's open you're executing, not analysing. Analysing live is how you talk yourself into the wrong side.
• Filtering It deletes half your screen On a fixed risk-reward scalping approach, bias does exactly one job: you only take setups pointing the same way as your sentence. Everything else, however good it looks, isn't yours today.
• Invalidation Write how you'll be wrong, including the clock "I'm wrong if we close below X" — but also "I'm wrong if we haven't moved by 8:15 PM." Time-based invalidation is badly underrated. A bias that hasn't worked in an hour usually isn't going to.
• Discipline One flip per day, maximum Flip once and you've responded to new information. Flip twice and you don't have a bias, you have a reaction — and reactions cost money.

The morning checklist

Five things, before New York. If you can't complete the sentence at the end, that is your answer.

1. 01 Daily range Are we in the expensive half or the cheap half?
2. 02 The draw What's the nearest untouched pool of liquidity, and which side is it on?
3. 03 Six levels PDH/PDL, PWH/PWL, Asia high and low, midnight open. Six. No more.
4. 04 The sequence What did London do to the Asia range — and did it reclaim?
5. 05 Write the sentence Out loud or on paper. If the blanks won't fill, you have no bias, and no bias means no trade.

The homework

For the next ten sessions, before New York opens, take a screenshot of your marked levels and write your one sentence. At the end of the session, go back and note what actually happened.

No entries. No P&L. Just direction and honesty.

Ten days of that will teach you more than ten more videos will — including, on the days you got it wrong, exactly which step you skipped.

Session times are IST with the US on daylight time and shift an hour in November. Everything here is how I approach my own trading, not a signal service and not financial advice. Trading futures carries risk, including loss of evaluation fees. Test any routine on your own data before you rely on it.