The swing has to be named before the retracement is drawn

Say it before you draw it

The house order is simple. You state the swing as a sentence. “From the 4 March low in the cash session to the 6 March high.” Only then does a ratio go on the sheet. If the sentence has a vague start, such as “somewhere in last week’s dip,” the pencil waits.

This feels slow to people who are used to dragging a retracement across a screen in a second. The slowness is the training. The drag is easy. The sentence is the part that changes the level.

The same rally, two anchors

In March we used one printed rally and split the room. One half anchored at Monday’s open. The other half anchored at the prior week’s low. Both groups drew 0.618. The levels did not match. Nobody had done the arithmetic wrong.

We kept both sheets on the rail for the rest of the evening. When someone said “the 0.618,” the reply was “which swing?” That question is now how the room starts almost every marking block.

What cancels the name

A swing’s name fails when price closes through its origin, or when you realise the origin was a spike that the session did not accept. A five-minute stab during a thin patch of the morning is a common false start on charts students bring from the Korean cash session.

Rename the swing and the retracement has to be drawn again. We do not slide the old ratios and hope. The copper line moves first. Graphite follows.