The first price you see isn’t where price discovery begins. Take the NYSE opening auction. Before the regular session begins, orders are already entering the exchange. Buy and sell interest accumulates. NYSE publishes imbalance information during the pre-open, including paired quantity and indicative pricing information. Then the opening auction brings eligible orders together to establish the opening price. That means the first trade isn’t simply “Someone bought. Someone sold. That’s the price.” It is the result of a process that has been developing before the opening print. And the scale can be substantial. During the first four months of 2024, NYSE said its opening auction averaged 44 million shares and $2.4 billion in traded value per day. That’s why the opening price deserves more attention than simply being the first candle on your chart. The candle shows you the result. The auction shows you part of the process that produced it. For a trader, that’s an important distinction. Price is the final number. Price discovery is everything that happened to determine that number.