The opening range breakout — the internet's most-taught trade
If intraday trading content had a national anthem, it would be the ORB. Mark the high and low of the first 5, 15 or 30 minutes. Buy the break of the high, sell the break of the low. Ride the momentum. Every platform, every language, every year — the same diagram with the same two arrows.
It is also the strategy family we have tested most thoroughly. Nine variants across two indices, a fourteen-year commodity sweep, and — because we take falsification seriously — a live paper-trading deployment. Here is everything we found.
Round 1: the backtest looks fine (of course it does)
The 5-minute ORB posted a training-period Sharpe of 1.73. The 30-minute variant showed profitable years whenever the market trended. If we had stopped here — where most course-sellers stop — this would be a very different article.
Round 2: out-of-sample, everything dies
| Variant | Instrument scope | Out-of-sample result |
|---|---|---|
| 5-min ORB (entry from 09:45) | NIFTY | −₹2.8L (after train Sharpe 1.73) |
| 5-min ORB | Bank index | −₹2.8L to −₹3.4L |
| 30-min ORB (entry from 09:45) | NIFTY | −₹2.4L |
| 30-min ORB | Bank index | −₹2.5L to −₹2.7L |
| 30-min ORB (entry from 10:00) | NIFTY | −₹2.2L to −₹3.6L |
| 30-min ORB (entry from 10:00) | Bank index | deep negative |
Full-sample forensics on the 30-minute NIFTY variant: over 1,200 trades, ~45% win rate, cumulative loss with losers consistently larger than winners. Walk-forward testing — retraining and re-testing era by era — confirmed it: −₹1.0L where the in-sample version had claimed a profit. "Trend-year dependent, negative full-sample" is the engine's verdict line.
Round 3: we let it trade paper money anyway
Because forward-testing is the only judge that can't be fooled, ORB variants ran in our live paper-trading fleet — real-time prices, realistic fills, no hindsight. They lost there too (five figures across both indices) and were retired. Backtest, walk-forward, live paper: three independent courts, same verdict.
Round 4: maybe it's an index thing? No.
We swept fourteen years of 1-minute data across gold, silver, copper, crude oil and natural gas — every opening-session breakout construction we could define. None survived. (For the curious: the only family that showed robustness in that entire sweep was the opposite trade — mean-reversion late in the session. Fading, not chasing.)
The honest summary
In-sample, ORB looks profitable. This is why it spread.
Out-of-sample, every variant we tested lost lakhs. Both indices, all entry timings.
Live paper trading confirmed the losses in real time. No hindsight involved.
Five commodities and fourteen years agree. It's not the market — it's the idea.
Maybe yours is different — specific filter, specific market. Send the exact rules; we'll run it through all four rounds, free.