Building a Volume Journal Around Thai Market Hours
SET opens at 09:45 and closes at 16:30. Your volume notes should respect that rhythm instead of copying templates built for US sessions.
A volume journal is not a trade log. It records what volume did at levels you cared about, whether or not you traded. We give workshop participants a printed template with columns for level, expected volume behaviour, actual volume behaviour, and outcome one week later.
For SET equities, the first thirty minutes after open often carry inflated volume relative to the rest of the day. We teach students to exclude that window when calculating averages for mid-day breakout setups, or to note 'open skew' explicitly so they do not misread a normal lunch dip as disinterest.
Afternoon sessions from 14:30 onward frequently see institutional activity pick up again. Breakouts that initiate after 14:00 with expanding volume tend to behave differently from morning gaps that fade. Your journal should tag the time bucket: open, mid, close.
Once a month, review only the rows where your expectation mismatched reality. Those rows are your curriculum. One student found she consistently overestimated volume on small-cap names; adjusting her average calculation fixed half her false entries.
Keep the journal on paper if you can. The act of writing bar numbers by hand slows you down enough to notice details a spreadsheet hides.
Want hands-on practice? See our Breakout Volume Confirmation Workshop or contact the studio.