How to use the Orbit System
A plain-English reference for the free Orbit System — what every filter does and what each number, panel and equity-curve metric actually means. Want to see it live on a chart instead? See visualising breakouts with the ORB Dashboard indicator.
The vocabulary
Every panel on the tool is built on a handful of definitions. Get these straight first and the rest of the page reads itself.
The whole tool is market-behaviour only — it measures what price did historically, with no entry signals, stops or profit targets baked in.
- Opening range (OR) — the high and low of the first 15, 30 or 60 minutes after the session open (or any custom window you pick — see step 02).
- Breakout — the first 5-minute candle to close outside the OR. Its direction (Long above, Short below) sets the trade. Wicks don’t count — only closes.
- Reversal — after that breakout, a later 5-minute candle closes beyond the opposite edge the same day; taken in the new direction, stop on the original side.
- Assumed trade — enter at the close of the entry candle, stop at the opposite OR edge. A full loss = −1 R.
- SD — one full opening-range width measured from the broken edge. It equals your 1 R of risk, so every extension and target is quoted in SD and stays comparable across markets.
- Intraday only — every number is measured within the same day and cut off at the cash close. A move that continues the next day does not count.
Why define the breakout on a 5-minute close instead of a wick?
A close beyond the range is far harder to fake than a single wick poke, so it reflects genuine acceptance outside the opening range. Roughly 99.9% of days break on this basis, which is why a raw “break rate” isn’t even shown.
What exactly is “1 R”?
One R is the distance from the broken edge to the opposite edge of the opening range — the assumed stop. Because targets and extensions are all measured in these OR widths (SD), a gold contract and a bitcoin contract read identically.
Scope controls
These controls decide which market, which opening range and which slice of history every panel is computed from. Change any of them and the whole page recomputes.
There is also an Expand to full width button above the tool — collapsed mode shows the equity curve plus the four headline cards, while expanded mode unlocks the deep-insight tabs (Edge finder, Time and place, Seasonality, COT report, Recent trades) covered in the later steps.
- Instrument — NQ (Nasdaq 100) is free; ES, GC, CL, BTC and 6B are premium (any paid plan unlocks 2 of your choice, or all access unlocks every symbol). Every figure is a scale-agnostic ratio, so any market compares directly to any other.
- Session — New York (the 09:30 ET cash open) or London (09:00 Berlin). Use the one you actually trade; continuation and reversal rates often differ between them.
- OR Duration (preset) — the opening range is the first 15, 30 or 60 minutes after the open. A longer range is wider, breaks later and gives a larger 1 R.
- Custom OR (premium) — pick ANY start and end time inside the trading day in 5-minute steps (15-min floor, 12-hour cap). Useful for studying non-standard windows (the European open, the London-Frankfurt overlap, the lunch range). First load downloads 1-minute bars for the symbol and takes a few seconds; subsequent filter changes on the same window are instant.
- Time horizon — a non-linear slider (big jumps in the early years, finer steps recently, then trailing windows) limits how far back the history reaches; or set an exact start date.
- Show times in — relabels every time on the page into your timezone. Display only — it never changes the underlying buckets.
Does picking a longer opening range change the win rate?
Yes. A 60-minute range is wider, so breakouts are rarer and each trade risks more, which reshapes the win rate and the equity curve. Flip between 15, 30 and 60 (or set your own window in Custom) to see the effect for your market.
Are the premium symbols calculated any differently?
No — identical opening-range, breakout and assumed-trade definitions across every symbol. Premium only covers the cost of the extra market data.
Why does Custom OR have a heads-up about loading time?
Custom windows are simulated from raw 1-minute bars rather than the pre-aggregated preset data. The first window on a fresh symbol downloads those bars and runs the simulation across the full history — a few seconds. After that the result is cached, so every filter change on the same window is microseconds. If usage grows we will migrate to a faster server-side solution.
The day filters
Day filters narrow the history to the days that look like the one in front of you. Leaving a group empty means “all”. The Filter mode switch decides whether selecting values keeps or removes those days — or, in Mixed mode, lets you do both at once.
Any breakdown bucket with fewer than 5 days is hidden, so a tiny sample can never mislead you with a flashy 100%.
- Filter mode — Include keeps only matching days. Exclude removes matching days and keeps the rest. Mixed lets each chip cycle off → include → exclude → off independently, so you can whitelist some tags and blacklist others across different groups in one query.
- Day of week — restrict to specific weekdays.
- Direction — whether the breakout closed Long (above the range) or Short (below it).
- Opening trend — where price sits on a 1-hour Bollinger Band (200-EMA basis, ±0.5σ / ±1.5σ) at the open, read across the open, the OR close and the first close outside — five zones from Strong Bearish to Strong Bullish.
- Volatility filter — the OR size as a % of ADR (the average of the last 3 sessions’ range). Low % = a tight range vs recent volatility; high % = an unusually wide one.
- News & holidays — “All news days” (any macro release), “No news days” (none), specific releases (CPI, PPI, NFP, Retail Sales, JOLTS, FOMC), and an Exclude market holidays toggle that is on by default and drops thin US-holiday sessions.
When would I use Exclude instead of Include?
Use Exclude to ask “what does everything except this look like?” — for example, exclude FOMC days to see the baseline without event-day noise, or exclude Mondays to remove a weekday you never trade.
When does Mixed mode help?
When the question crosses groups — e.g. “keep only Tuesdays AND Wednesdays AND drop CPI / NFP days”. Pure Include would lose the news-exclusion, and pure Exclude would lose the weekday-restriction; Mixed lets both happen at once because each chip carries its own include / exclude state.
What is ADR and why use it for volatility?
ADR is the average daily range over the last three full sessions. Expressing the opening range as a percentage of it makes “wide” and “tight” mean the same thing whether the market is quiet or fast — an absolute point value would not.
Trade type and trade filters
The Trade type switch decides which assumed trade every panel and the equity curve study. The trade-level filters then refine which individual trades count.
- Breakout — the first 5-minute close outside the range.
- Reversal — a later close beyond the opposite edge after that breakout (around a third of breakouts reverse).
- Combined — take both every day and merge them into one set of stats and a single equity curve.
- Breakout direction — keep only Long or only Short trades.
- Bars until entry — how many 5-minute candles after the OR it took to break (1 = the very first candle).
- Trigger close distance — how far beyond the edge that candle closed, in SD. The further out, the wider the stop and the worse the reward-to-risk.
- Gap filter — the overnight gap: how far the session opened from the prior day’s cash close, in % (Gap down/up, Flat = within ±0.1%, “big” = 0.5%+). Lets you ask how the opening range behaves after a gap up vs a gap down.
Why does a later entry (more bars) matter?
A breakout that takes many candles to form often closes further from the edge, so the stop is wider and the reward-to-risk is poorer. The bars-until-entry and trigger-distance filters let you isolate the cleaner, earlier breaks.
What does Combined actually show?
It trades the breakout and, when it happens, the reversal on the same day, aggregating both into one equity curve — useful for seeing the net result of trading every signal rather than cherry-picking one.
Do the trade-level filters apply in Custom OR mode?
Direction and Trade type apply everywhere. Bars until entry, Trigger close distance, Opening trend, Volatility and the Gap filter currently apply only on the preset 15 / 30 / 60-min windows, because they depend on the chosen OR window. The Custom-OR picker tells you so inline.
The outcome numbers
These are the four “what happened next” headline cards shown by default below the equity curve — they answer how the day finished given the filters above.
A small Recent trades tab (in the expanded view) lists the last 12 months of those filtered trades — date, direction, entry time and price, OR range, stop, how it exited (take profit / stop loss / end of day) and the R result — so you can pull any day up on your own chart and verify the engine.
- Continuation — the breakout set the direction and the day closed beyond the range on that same side.
- Reversal — price broke one way but closed beyond the opposite side by the cash close.
- Closed inside — broke out at some point but came back and closed inside the opening range.
- Both sides broke — 5-minute candles closed beyond the range on both the high AND the low side during the day.
Why is there no overall “break rate”?
Roughly 99.9% of days break on the 5-minute close basis — the number would always be near 100% and wouldn’t teach you anything. The interesting questions are what happens AFTER the break, which is what these four cards answer.
Continuation + Reversal + Closed inside don’t add up to 100% — why?
Days where both sides broke can contribute to more than one bucket (e.g. it broke up, came back, broke down and closed there — counted as Reversal but also lives in “Both sides broke”). Read the four cards as independent slices of the same set of days.
Edge finder
The Edge finder tab (expanded view) re-cuts the currently-filtered trades by every individual filter dimension at once, so you can see at a glance where the strategy actually makes its R — and where it bleeds.
Each table reports the same four columns per category: trades, win rate, profit factor and total R, net of the active target mode (a Time / Fixed-SD / Statistical exit) and any per-trade cost.
- By Direction — Long vs Short. Asymmetries here are common (e.g. one side does more of the lifting on a given market).
- By Day of week — Mon → Fri. A weekday tilt often shows up here long before any single-day filter chip would surface it.
- By Opening trend — the five Bollinger zones. Tells you whether the edge lives in trending opens or fading-back-in opens.
- By Bars until entry — the 1-3 / 4-6 / 7-9 / 10-12 / 13+ buckets. The early-break edge usually dwarfs late entries.
- By Trigger close distance — 0-0.2 SD / 0.2-0.4 / 0.4-0.6 / 0.6-0.8 / 0.8-1 / 1 SD+. The wider the entry close, the wider the stop and the worse the typical R.
- By Overnight gap — gap down/flat/up tiers. Shows whether the edge changes after the market gaps away from the prior close.
- By News & holidays — one row per release (FOMC, CPI, PPI, NFP, Retail Sales, JOLTS), plus No news and Holiday. Non-exclusive: a day with multiple tags shows up in multiple rows.
How is the Edge finder different from just toggling each filter myself?
Toggling filters one at a time tells you the result for ONE setting. The Edge finder shows EVERY setting in each group side by side at once, so you can spot the strongest and weakest categories without dozens of clicks.
Why don’t the trades on the news rows add up to the total?
The news / holiday row is non-exclusive — a CPI day that also fell on a Thursday counts in both the CPI row and the Thursday row of the Day-of-week table. The other tables (Direction, DOW, Trend, Bars, Trigger) ARE exclusive and add up cleanly.
Time and place
The Time and place tab (expanded view) studies winning trades only — losers tell you the trade didn’t work, but winners tell you where to plan your stop and your target. Layout: retracement on the left (it happens first), extension on the right.
Two charts per side: a timing chart and a distance chart. Every chart highlights five markers — MEDIAN (white), AVERAGE (fuchsia), the FIRST QUARTILE / Q1 (amber, the value 25% of winners fall below), the THIRD QUARTILE / Q3 (green, the value 75% fall below) and the MOST-TRADED band or slot (cyan); each is rounded to the nearest bar, and when several fall on the same bar the median takes priority. The legend below each chart is clickable: click a marker to show only that one, click it again to bring them all back, and hover any marker for a plain-English definition. All figures are called out in the legend.
- Retracement timing — at which minute after entry the deepest pullback into the range tends to form.
- Retracement distance — the distribution of how deep that pullback goes, in SD (0.05-SD bands from 0 to 0.90). Each winner counts once, in the single band it actually retraced to, so the bands add up to all winners. A stop-placement guide.
- Extension timing — at which minute the favourable move peaks.
- Extension distance — the distribution of how far that move runs, in SD (0.5-SD bands from 0 to 9). Each winner counts once, in the furthest band it reached. A take-profit guide.
Why winners only?
These are planning numbers: where a stop on a winning trade typically survives, and how far a winning trade typically runs. Folding in losers would shift both to “not far” and “not deep” and tell you nothing about the trades you actually want to take.
Why are both average AND median highlighted?
Distributions of run / retrace distances are skewed — a handful of monster days drag the average up. The median sits at the middle case (half of winners do less, half do more) and is usually a more honest planning number.
The Seasonality scanner
The Seasonality tab (expanded view) studies the instrument’s calendar behaviour, ignoring every ORB filter — it answers “what does this market typically do at this time of year?” Three views you can switch between:
- Seasonal curve — the average cumulative % path over a year, rebased to 0% on Jan 1, averaged across the complete years inside your time horizon. Click two points to mark a window and a side panel reports the avg / median / win-rate / years-up / best / worst-year stats for that calendar stretch.
- Detrend toggle — subtract each year’s own linear drift before averaging, so the curve oscillates around 0 and shows RELATIVE seasonal strength even on instruments stuck in a long up/down-trend.
- Remove COVID toggle — drops the entire 2020 year from the average. Useful when looking at the detrended curve, where the crash + recovery would otherwise distort the shape.
- Current-year overlay — adds the current year-to-date as a white dashed line so you can compare today’s path against the seasonal average.
- Weekday returns — average close-to-close % return per weekday (Mon-Fri) over the current time horizon, with % up and sample size per bar.
- Monthly table — full year×month matrix of close-to-close monthly % returns, with per-month average / standard deviation / % up footers. Always uses the full history regardless of the time horizon.
- Filter ORB to this window — promotes any drawn seasonal window into a recurring ORB-day filter, so the whole equity curve and every panel restricts to that calendar stretch every year. A banner at the top of the expanded sidebar shows the active window with a one-click remove.
Is the seasonality affected by my ORB filters?
No — by design. Seasonality is a pure price-history product, computed from the daily cash closes alone, independent of every filter on the page. The TIME HORIZON does apply (so widening the slider expands the years going into the average), but no ORB filter does.
Why is the monthly table the “easy mode”?
It’s the simplest read: every cell is a single monthly return, green if up and red if down, with the long-run average and % up underneath. No chart literacy required.
The COT report
The COT (Commitments of Traders) tab (expanded view) layers the weekly CFTC positioning data on top of the instrument. The CFTC publishes the report every Friday at 15:30 ET, covering positions as of the prior Tuesday — there is a built-in 3-day lag.
Two sub-tabs, two views of the same five trader categories (the “smart money” line — Leveraged Funds on financial futures, Managed Money on commodities — is drawn thicker in both):
- Net positions — raw long-minus-short contracts per category, plotted over the time horizon. Useful for spotting trend changes in positioning.
- COT Index — each category’s net normalised on a 0-100 scale against its rolling window, with the <20 / >80 extreme zones shaded. Above 80 = positioning sits near a multi-year high (often a crowded long, near sentiment tops); below 20 = washed-out short positioning (often near sentiment bottoms).
- 3-year / 1-year window — a small dropdown beside the sub-tabs switches the COT Index normalisation between the long-cycle 3-year (156-week) window and a sharper 1-year (52-week) window. The COT-based ORB filter (below) uses whichever window is selected, so the picture and the filter stay in lockstep.
- Click-to-solo legend — clicking any category isolates that one line; click it again or “Show all” to bring the others back. Hover the legend to read who each category is and why traders watch them.
- Last week’s change in net position — green / red delta bars showing who added vs cut last report. A quick read on incremental flow.
- Filter ORB to this positioning — the side panel on the right turns the COT Index into a real ORB-day filter. Pick a category, pick a range (Above 80, Below 20, or a Between band), click Apply, and the entire page restricts to days whose latest weekly COT Index for that category sat in that zone. A banner appears at the top of the expanded sidebar with a one-click remove.
Why is Leveraged Funds the highlighted line on NQ but Managed Money on gold?
NQ is reported under the TFF (Traders in Financial Futures) schema where Leveraged Funds is the hedge-fund / CTA bucket; gold is reported under the Disaggregated schema where the same kind of player shows up as Managed Money. The headline category just follows the report type for each market.
Does the COT filter clear when I switch symbols?
Yes — positioning is symbol-specific (a Leveraged-Funds extreme on NQ tells you nothing about gold), so the filter resets on symbol change. The chart’s solo-line state also resets.
The equity curve and its metrics
The equity curve cumulates every filtered trade in date order, so every filter you toggle reshapes a real curve. The dropdowns below it decide how each trade is exited and sized; the metrics grid quantifies the result.
A row of overlay chips (in the expanded view only) layers extra analysis on top — drawdowns, stagnation, time dividers, a buy & hold benchmark and a Monte Carlo bootstrap — without changing the underlying curve.
- Target mode — three dropdowns, pick one: Time (exit at the cash close; for London also flatten at the New York open), Fixed (a 1 / 2 / 3 SD take-profit) or Statistical (a take-profit at the winners’ median / average / Q1 / Q3 / most-traded run distance, recomputed for the current filters so the level follows the data).
- Risk mode — R is the honest, sizing-agnostic curve (every trade risks a flat 1 R). Compounded % risks a fixed % of current equity, drawn on a log scale and comparable to buy & hold.
- Simulate costs — deduct a fixed per-trade cost (0.01 / 0.025 / 0.05 R) for spread, slippage and commission; the whole curve recomputes net of it.
- vs Buy & hold (compounded mode) — overlays the instrument’s actual compounded return on the same log axis. The honest like-for-like comparison.
- Drawdown — adds the underwater curve (in R or %) below the equity line, so you see the worst-case stretches at a glance.
- Max stagnation — shades the longest peak-to-new-high stretch on the curve. A “how long was I underwater” read.
- Time dividers — overlays dotted vertical year (or month, on shorter horizons) dividers across the curve so the time axis becomes legible.
- Monte Carlo — resamples the filtered trades into 10 simulated equity paths of 1,000 trades each (in the active basis). Tells you the rough spread of outcomes a future stretch of the same edge might produce — a re-roll button draws a fresh simulation. Requires ≥100 trades.
- Metrics grid — Final / Trades / Win rate / Avg per trade / Max drawdown / Avg drawdown / Return-to-drawdown / Max consecutive wins / Max consecutive losses / Max stagnation (longest calendar-day stretch between an equity peak and the next new high).
R or compounded % — which should I trust?
R is the honest, sizing-agnostic view: every trade risks the same 1 R, so the shape reflects the edge, not a position-sizing trick. Compounded % is illustrative and very sensitive to the % you pick, but it is what lets you compare against buy & hold.
Why care about return/drawdown and stagnation, not just the final number?
A big final figure earned through a brutal drawdown or years stuck underwater is rarely tradeable in real life. Return-to-drawdown and max stagnation tell you whether the curve was actually survivable.
What is the Monte Carlo for if it’s not a forecast?
It is a sanity check on the shape of the curve you’re looking at: re-rolling the same trades in a different order shows you the range of outcomes a different sequence might have produced. A curve whose Monte Carlo spread is gigantic relative to its mean was probably lucky in the order, not in the edge.
This guide is educational and describes how the statistics tool works and what its numbers mean. It is not trading advice, a signal service or a guarantee of future results. Trading financial instruments carries substantial risk — never risk money you cannot afford to lose.