The Vocabulary You Need Before Your First Session
Most early confusion about this approach is vocabulary confusion wearing a disguise. The ideas are not complicated, but the words are used loosely, differ slightly between sources, and are rarely defined by anyone who has been using them for years. What follows is the small set of terms that turn up constantly, with the distinctions that matter rather than dictionary definitions.
Range, Height and Edges
The range is the span between the high and the low of the opening period. Its height is simply the distance between them, and height is the word to use when comparing today's range with a typical one. The edges are the high and the low individually. When someone says price is testing the edge, they mean it has returned to one of those two lines.
A point of confusion: the range is a span, not a direction. Saying a range is large tells you nothing about whether the session is bullish. It tells you the disagreement was wide.
Breakout, and the Question of What Counts
A breakout is price moving beyond one of the edges. That much everyone agrees on. The disagreement is about what qualifies, and it is a real disagreement rather than pedantry.
Some people count any trade beyond the line. Others require a candle to close beyond it, which means waiting until the end of whatever interval they are watching. Others require a certain distance beyond the line before counting it. These produce noticeably different signals on the same chart, so when reading someone's description of their rule, this is the definition worth pinning down first.
False Break, Failed Breakout and Retest
A false break is price moving beyond an edge and then returning inside the range without the move continuing. It is one of the most common outcomes and is not an anomaly.
Failed breakout is sometimes used interchangeably and sometimes means something slightly stronger, namely a break that reverses and then continues through the opposite edge. The distinction is worth holding because the two situations feel very different when you are in one. In the first, the trade simply did not work. In the second, the market did the opposite of what the break suggested.
A retest is price breaking an edge, moving away, then coming back to touch that same edge from the other side before continuing. The line that was resistance is now being approached as support, or the reverse.
The word appears constantly because some traders wait for a retest before entering rather than entering on the break itself. Whether that improves anything is contested. What matters for reading is that retest describes a sequence of events, not a type of level.
Gaps and Other Common Mix-Ups
A gap is a session opening at a price meaningfully different from where the previous session closed, with no trading in between. Gaps matter here because a session that gaps has already moved before the opening range begins forming, so the range is being built in the aftermath of a move rather than at a neutral starting point.
You will hear about gaps filling, which means price returning to the previous close. Treat this as a description of something that sometimes happens, not a rule.
These are the highest and lowest prices of the entire day so far, which is not the same as the opening range high and low. Early in the day they are usually identical, and they diverge the moment price leaves the range. Confusing the two is a common source of misread advice, because a statement about the session high is a statement about a moving number while a statement about the range high is about a fixed one.
Getting the Words Straight First
None of these terms is difficult, and that is precisely the trap. They are easy enough to half understand from context, and a half understanding survives until a decision depends on it. Reading someone's rule and being unsure whether they meant a close beyond the line or a touch is the kind of gap that produces results you cannot explain afterwards.
Before watching a live session, it is worth writing your own one line definition of each of these and checking it against a couple of sources. Where the sources disagree, that disagreement is useful information about where the genuine ambiguity sits.