The 1st-Bar setup, on real FTSE days

Tom's home-market strategy hangs on one candle: the first 5-minute bar after the London cash open. Negative bar → he buys the break of the low (or shorts the break of the high). Positive bar → he shorts the break of the low. Step through 198 real FTSE 100 days (Oct 2025 – Jul 2026, exported from a live TradingView Premium feed) and watch each setup arm, trigger, and play out.

Correction — no edge here after all. We first reported this as "promising" (profit factor ~1.1–1.3 with a take-profit exit). That was a backtesting bug on our side: the engine managed the trade from the entry bar itself, letting the very move that triggered the entry also "hit" the target — lookahead. Fixed (manage from the next bar), 1BN/1BP loses on these 198 FTSE days in every variant (profit factor 0.73–0.85, net negative) — no demonstrated edge, same as the 17-year DAX result. We're leaving the corrected numbers up because catching and publishing our own mistake is exactly the standard this platform is built on.

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First bar

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Bar range

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Buy trigger

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Short trigger

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1BN first bar 1BP first bar Buy trigger Short trigger Stop (= bar width)

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The mechanical outcome shown

One trade per day: the first trigger that price hits wins (the other cancels). Stop = the width of the first bar, on the opposite side. Exit = bank the move: take profit at +25 pts, with the stop moved to breakeven once +6 pts — Tom's FTSE rule ("take it quick, it backs and fills"). A 0.6-pt bid/ask cost is charged. With correct no-lookahead handling, no exit rule turns this into an edge on this sample — the setup is worth knowing as a pattern, not trading as a system.

Data: 198 real FTSE 100 (TVC:UKX) trading days, 5-min, Oct 2025 – Jul 2026, from a live TradingView Premium feed. Engine: tools/backtest_1bp.py. Rules from Tom Hougaard's public "1BN & 1BP FTSE Strategy" document. Educational content — not investment advice; past performance does not guarantee future results.