summary: how to use the new week opening gap report to decide whether friday's close is a realistic target for the week, including the by-weekday subreport and the gap reference and fill settings.
futures don't trade over the weekend, but the world keeps moving. when the market reopens on sunday evening it often reopens at a different price than where it stopped on friday, leaving a gap on the chart with no trading in between. that gap is the new week opening gap, or NWOG.
what it measures
the report answers one question: how often does price come back to fill the weekend gap during the week that follows?
it takes friday's close and sunday's reopen, categorizes the week as opened above or opened below depending on which side of friday's close the market reopened, then checks whether price returns to the fill level at any point from monday through friday. if the week opened above, a retrace means price came back down to the level. if it opened below, a retrace means price came back up to it.
the output is a retrace rate for each direction, so you can see whether gap ups and gap downs behave the same way on your ticker. they often don't.
how to read it
read the two columns separately. opened above and opened below are different setups, and one side is frequently far more reliable than the other.
a high retrace rate on one side means friday's close is a realistic target when the week opens on that side. a low retrace rate means fading the gap is the lower-probability play, and your targets are better placed short of the fill level. check the number of weeks behind each column before you lean on it: weekly data accumulates slowly, so a six-month window is a much smaller sample than the same window on a daily report.
the subreports
standard
the base view. splits weeks into opened above and opened below, and shows the share of each that retraced to the fill level versus the share that didn't. the table underneath lists every week in the window with the direction it opened and the size of the gap in both points and percent, so you can see whether the weeks that filled were the small gaps and the ones that didn't were the large ones.
by weekday
answers the timing question: when in the week does the gap actually fill?
it narrows to the weeks where the gap did fill, credits each one to the first weekday the fill happened on, and shows how those cluster across monday to friday. later touches in the same week are ignored, so each filled week counts once.
this is the subreport that turns the setup into a plan. if fills cluster early in the week, the gap is an early-week trade and an unfilled gap by midweek is a signal to drop it rather than to keep waiting. if fills spread evenly across the week, friday's close stays a live level the whole way through. note that the percentages here are out of the weeks that filled, not out of all weeks, so read this one alongside the standard view rather than instead of it.
the settings you can change
open customize in the left sidebar to change how the gap is defined:
gap reference — measure the gap from friday's closing price, or from friday's last candle so that only the visible gap on the chart counts. in visible gap mode, weeks that reopen inside friday's last candle have no visible gap and drop out of the sample
fill percentage — how much of the gap price has to close before the week counts as retraced. leave it at a full return to the reference for a strict read, or lower it if you'd take a partial fill as your target
NWOG always runs on the full futures day (the Daily session, 6:00 pm to 5:00 pm ET), so there's no session to pick: any touch of the level during the week counts. your settings carry across to the by-weekday subreport.
how traders use it
the practical use is target selection at the start of the week. if the data on your ticker shows the gap fills most weeks when the market reopens above friday's close, then friday's close is a level worth trading toward on a gap up, and you can plan entries and profit targets around it on monday morning.
the more useful read is often the negative one. if the retrace rate is low in one direction, that tells you not to sit in a fade waiting for a fill that historically doesn't come, and to place targets before the level instead. combine the two subreports for the full plan: the standard view tells you whether to expect the fill, and by weekday tells you how long to give it.
how this differs from the gap fill report
the two reports measure the same behavior on different clocks, and they're easy to confuse.
gap fill is a daily report — the gap between one session's close and the next session's open, resolved within the day
NWOG is a weekly report — the gap left by the weekend, resolved at any point across the following five days
they can point in opposite directions on the same monday, and that's not a contradiction: a gap can stay unfilled on the day and still fill by wednesday.
tips
check both directions before you commit. a strong overall number can hide a weak side, and you only ever trade one side of the gap in a given week.
weekly samples build slowly. lengthen the date range before reading anything into a rate, and compare it against a second ticker in the same complex.
decide your fill percentage before you look at the results, not after. lowering it until the number looks good is how you talk yourself into a setup.
pair the retrace rate with the gap-size column in the table. a level that's a few points away and one that's a full day's range away are not the same trade, even inside the same bucket.