Field note · 21 August 2026
What we pin before the Daegu cash open
The morning circle does not try to predict the day. It marks the prices that would make the written plan relevant, and the conditions that keep you flat.
The cash market in Seoul opens at 09:00. Our circle starts at 08:10 and ends at 08:40, which is long enough to mark a sheet and short enough that nobody begins a second theory. The point of the half hour is not a forecast. A forecast asks the day to behave. A sheet asks where your existing plan would care.
Seo Mirae runs the circle. The board holds four marks and then we stop.
The four marks
First, yesterday’s high and yesterday’s low. If you trade inside the prior day, you need those edges on paper, not as a memory from a screen you already closed.
Second, one weekly level the room still respects. A swing high that has not been exceeded, or a range edge that price has returned to more than once. One level, not a ladder of five. If you need five weekly lines, you do not yet know which one would change your mind.
Third, the opening range you will wait for. Some plans use the first five minutes, some the first fifteen. The circle does not argue for a universal length. It asks you to write the length already in your plan, and to say what a break and a failed break look like.
Fourth, a stand-aside sentence. Holiday thinness, a scheduled figure in the first hour, or a chart that is still inside yesterday’s range with no setup. “I will see how it feels” is not a sentence we keep on the board.
A morning that stayed flat
On a humid Thursday in August the prior day’s range was narrow and the weekly level sat well above the open. Two people in the circle had breakout plans that needed a push through that weekly level. The stand-aside line they wrote was simple: if the first half hour cannot leave the prior day, there is no trade under that plan. The half hour did not leave. Both stayed flat. One of them said afterwards that the morning felt like a wasted journey from Suseong. The sheet had done the only job it has. It kept a plan from being replaced by boredom.
The late copy of the board stays in the room until 09:00. If you miss the circle, you can still transcribe it. You cannot ask the room to invent a new opinion at 08:55.
Bring a plan, not a wish
The circle is a poor first sitting if you have never written a setup down. The marks assume you already know what you are allowed to trade. Chart Reading Evening and the Trade Plan Studio exist for that earlier work. The morning is only the daily use of a plan you can already read aloud.