Opening Types (Dalton): Do They Predict Session Behavior?
Dalton's 4 Opening Types | ES | 2008-2026 | 4,662 sessions
What Traders Believe
James Dalton classifies every session into one of four opening typesbased on the first 30–60 minutes of price action. The theory — taught in Mind Over Markets and Markets in Profile— is that the opening type tells you what kind of session to expect:
- Open Drive (OD)— aggressive directional move from the open. Believed to signal strong conviction and trending sessions.
- Open Test Drive (OTD)— price tests one direction, rejects, then drives the other way. Believed to confirm the real direction.
- Open Rejection Reverse (ORR)— price makes a brief probe, gets aggressively rejected, and reverses hard. Believed to mark key turning points.
- Open Auction (OA)— no clear direction; price rotates both ways. Believed to indicate balanced, range-bound sessions.
The claim: identifying the opening type early gives you a roadmap for the rest of the session. We tested it. 4,662 sessions. Every type. Continuation rates, session ranges, and actual trade performance.
Distribution of Opening Types
How Often Does Each Type Occur?
What Does This Tell Us?
Nearly half of all sessions(49%) classify as Open Auction — the “no clear direction” type. This is the default state of the market: balanced, rotational, indecisive.
The supposedly high-conviction types — OD and ORR — together make up only 29%of sessions. If you're waiting for a “clear opening type signal,” you're sitting out half the time.
Direction split within OD and OTD is nearly 50/50 up vs. down, meaning the type classification itself carries no directional bias. The interesting question is whether the type predicts continuation, not direction.
Continuation Rate & Session Range by Type
Continuation Rates & Average Session Range
Breakdown Table
| Type | N | Cont. Rate | Avg Range (pts) |
|---|---|---|---|
| OD | 793 | 62.5% | 22.4 |
| OTD | 1,026 | 55.8% | 18.7 |
| ORR | 560 | 51.2% | 19.1 |
| OA | 2,283 | 50.1% | 14.3 |
Can You Trade It? Backtest Results
Continuation Trades: Enter at Opening Type Confirmation, 2:1 R:R
Entry in the direction of the opening type's implied bias at the end of the classification window. Stop at 2:1 risk-reward. Conservative stop-first resolution.
| Type | Target (pts) | R:R | N | Win Rate | PF | PnL (pts) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| OD | 4 | 2:1 | 793 | 52.1% | 1.42 | +245.0 |
| 8 | 2:1 | 793 | 38.5% | 1.18 | +122.0 | |
| 12 | 2:1 | 793 | 28.2% | 0.95 | -35.0 | |
| OTD | 4 | 2:1 | 1,026 | 48.5% | 1.15 | +130.0 |
| 8 | 2:1 | 1,026 | 35.2% | 0.98 | -15.0 | |
| ORR | 4 | 2:1 | 560 | 46.1% | 1.05 | +22.0 |
| 8 | 2:1 | 560 | 32.5% | 0.89 | -48.0 |
Yearly Stability: Continuation Rate Over Time
Continuation Rate by Type (Selected Years)
What the Lines Show
Open Drive's continuation rate stays consistently above 60% across all measurement periods — it is genuinely the most directional opening type. But the margin over coin-flip is modest: roughly 10–15 percentage points of edge.
Open Auction hovers near 50% throughout, confirming it carries essentially zero directional information. OTD and ORR sit in between, with inconsistent year-to-year behavior.
The spread between OD and OA is relatively stable, suggesting the hierarchy is real — OD is genuinely more directional — but the absolute edge is small.
Classification Challenges
A key problem with opening type analysis: the classification is subjective. Dalton's books describe the types qualitatively, not with exact rules. Our classification uses a specific algorithm, but different implementations would produce different distributions.
The boundary between OTD and ORR is particularly blurry. Both involve a test and reversal — the difference is the aggressiveness of the rejection. Discretionary traders will classify the same session differently.
This is a fundamental weakness of the framework: a classification system that different analysts apply differently cannot produce consistent, repeatable edge.
The Verdict
Partially Useful, but Not a Trading System
Of the four opening types, only Open Drivecarries meaningful predictive information: 62.5% continuation rate, 22.4 pts average range, and a tradeable (if thin) edge at tight targets. The other three types are somewhere between “marginally above coin-flip” and “pure noise.”
The core idea — that the opening period reveals session intent — has a grain of truth for extreme cases (aggressive drives). But the four-type framework over-classifieswhat is really a spectrum. You don't need four buckets. You need one question: “Was the open aggressive and one-directional?” If yes, lean with it. If not, the opening type label adds nothing.
Don't build a trading system around opening type classifications. Use Open Drive as a contextual filter— one input among many — and ignore the rest.