Open drive

What it is

Open drive is a market profile term describing an opening session that moves directionally with sustained volume from the first bar of the cash session, without retracing back through the opening range. The market opens, prints in one direction, and keeps going — buyers (or sellers) maintain control and never give the other side a meaningful opportunity to test.

The concept comes from the classic market profile framework popularized by Jim Dalton's work, which classifies the open into a small number of archetypes — open drive, open test drive, open auction, open rejection reversal — based on how the first hour or so of activity unfolds relative to the prior session's value area.

Why it matters

Open drive is typically read as the strongest opening type. It signals high conviction — usually because an overnight catalyst (data, news, structural shift) has changed the perceived fair value before the cash session even starts. Trading the day from an open drive is mechanically simpler than from balanced opens: the day is more likely to be a trend day, the initial balance gets extended, and counter-trend trades carry above-average risk.

Practical uses include:

• Setting the day's expectations — open drive typically discourages mean-reversion and favors continuation.
• Anchoring entries to pull-backs that hold above the open price rather than fading the move.
• Sizing more confidently into a directional plan when the open behaves consistently with the drive.

How it appears on Sierra Chart

Sierra Chart's TPO and Volume Profile studies make the open archetype visible directly. An open drive shows up as a session profile whose early TPO letters cluster at one extreme, with the developing POC drifting in the direction of the drive rather than balancing in the middle. The opening range — the first one or two TPO brackets — sits at the opposite extreme from where price ultimately spent the rest of the morning.

Some practitioners use a simple visual rule: if price does not return to within X ticks of the open price during the first 30 to 60 minutes of RTH, the session has open-drive characteristics. Custom studies can encode this and tag the session label automatically.

Common patterns / pitfalls

• Open drive is a contextual read, not a guaranteed outcome. Drives sometimes stall and the day morphs into a balance — the playbook needs to allow for that.
• Forcing an open-drive interpretation onto a session that opened gradually is a classic mistake. Wait for the geometry to confirm.
• Open drives that fail (the market reverses through the open later in the session) often produce especially sharp moves because participants positioned with the drive get stopped together.
• Open drive on thin pre-holiday or summer sessions carries less informational weight than open drive on a high-volume RTH day.

Related SCS studies

Open drive analysis is a profile-reading skill that sits on top of Sierra Chart's native TPO and Volume Profile tools. SCS order flow products help confirm that the drive has real aggressive volume behind it rather than being a thin-tape artifact.