THE CIX ARCHIVE · A FRESH EDITION
Find the Range. Know When It Ends.
The early Small Accounts guide began with a simple condition: a market moving inside a range. This week, mark the boundaries before considering an entry, and write the event that would make the idea invalid. Your exercise uses a historical chart, not a live order.
Start with the condition
The original CIX Small Accounts guide looked for range-bound pairs rather than chasing a move that had already happened. A range describes repeated trading between an area of support and an area of resistance. It is an observation about the chart so far. It does not oblige the next candle to stay inside it. Start with the one-hour chart used in the archive, then look at a wider timeframe for context. A quiet section inside a strong downtrend can be a pause, not a stable opportunity.
Draw zones before choosing the trade
Choose the chart window before marking levels. Identify more than one reaction near each boundary and use a small zone rather than pretending one exact price explains every trade. Note how often price crossed the zone and how quickly it returned. If the boundaries only look convincing after you exclude inconvenient candles, the setup is weak. Keep the original drawing so you cannot move the goalposts after the result.
Leave room for the whole trade
Measure the distance from a possible entry to a realistic exit inside the upper zone. Then account for the spread, fees and a less favourable fill. A visible range can be too narrow to trade economically. Also mark an invalidation outside the idea: what price behaviour would tell you that the range assumption has failed? The distance to that planned exit affects position size. It is not a guaranteed maximum loss.
When the range ends
A move beyond the boundary can continue, reverse or return into the range. Decide beforehand what you will treat as invalidation; do not invent a rule to justify staying in a losing position. The archived method depends on its market condition. Once that condition disappears, pausing is a valid result. Repeatedly buying a falling market because the old lower boundary used to hold is a different trade.
Your exercise
Take one historical chart and hide the later candles. Record the pair, date, timeframe, two boundary zones, a possible entry, an exit and an invalidation. Write down one reason to skip it. Reveal the next section and keep both the original plan and the result. Repeat on a chart where no convincing range exists: correctly rejecting a setup is part of the exercise.
Adapted from How To Grow Small Accounts Into Big Ones in the early CIX archive, with a new practical worksheet. Educational material; examples are not live trade instructions.