Three hours with one chart: a sample London morning
A walk through a dated FTSE morning as we would mark it on the wall canvas, without turning the sitting into a list of trade entries.
The sheet on the wall one Tuesday in March was FTSE futures, 15-minute candles, London morning only. Overnight had left a relatively narrow range. We wrote that fact at 07:30 and then did not mention overnight again until a cash bar actually traded through those prints.
The 08:00 candle opened inside the night range and closed as a modest bullish body with a small upper wick. Nobody in the room was allowed to say 'bullish engulfing of the night' because it had not engulfed anything yet; it had only closed higher than it opened. The next bar, 08:15, did push through the night high, then closed back inside. That upper wick became the first interesting mark of the morning: a break that could not hold inside a single bar.
From 08:30 to 09:30 the session built a small range under that failed high. Two students wanted to call the range 'coiling'. We asked them to write only what was visible: several closes clustered, wicks probing both ways, no new session high. Coiling is a story about what happens next. The sheet is for what has already closed.
The 10:00 bar was large relative to the morning, a wide real body down through the range lows. That is the sort of bar people remember. The useful work was on 10:15 and 10:30: did those closes continue, or did they put in lower wicks that took back a third of the drop? They put in wicks. We still did not call a reversal. We called two closes that failed to follow the large down bar, and we waited until 11:00 before describing the morning as a failed breakdown plus a return into the earlier cluster.
Lunch arrived with a smaller average body, as it often does. We stopped the live mark at 11:00 because that was the booked window. The remaining hours exist on the same chart, and a private review is the place to ask what you would have done with them. A group morning that tries to narrate the entire cash day usually ends with everyone tired and the last two hours unread.