Initial Balance | Futures Trading Explained

The Initial Balance is the price range built during the first 60 minutes of the regular trading session. For ES and MES, that means 9:30 to 10:30 New York time. You mark the highest price and the lowest price printed in that hour, and those two lines become your IB high and IB low for the rest of the day. The idea comes from Market Profile, developed by Peter Steidlmayer at the Chicago Board of Trade and spread widely by Jim Dalton's work. In the pit days, that first hour was when the floor traders established the early range of balance while the bigger overnight and institutional orders got filled. The concept survived the move to screens because the logic still holds. The first hour is where the overnight session, the morning news, and the opening orders all collide. The range they leave behind becomes a reference the market answers to all day.

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