What do you find helpful in predicting at the end of trading today that tomorrow will be a "run day," a day that starts at the low and ends at the high, or starts at the high and ends at the low?
Don't try to predict (a losers game). Instead, try to exploit whatever price direction (up or down) that appears. Therefore, be ready to trade regardless if its a trend day or range day. Yet, most trend days involve key market events (e.g. FED actions, ECB actions, IMF actions, geopolitical events, hyped economic reports, big breaking news, big earnings events and so on). Simply, pull up a chart of all those days you're talking about and then look at what key market events occurred those particular days. Next, sit back and wait for those events to occur again because most trend days are not technical analysis related just in case your question was aimed at TA. Thus, you can still use TA to time your entry into those types of trading days instead of trying to use TA to predict when those trading days will appear. Its all about market context.
People ask me where the market ended up, I never have a clue, don't remember if it was a trending day or all chop, I stay focused on the trade I am taking, where S/R is, where price is within current trend or end of a trend. Since I am going to end the trade in shortest amount of bars I can to a target area, where it open to where it closes are for swing traders to trade.
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% Cant really predict + your two questions are quite different. a] Bull market uptrend[run days/trend days] hardly pull back @ all, wait for a'' normal ''pullback, miss the whole ,move.But live + learn,LOL] z] Bear moves/bear markets tend to be much wilder, ever bounced a superball down a stairs?????, it stiil goes down but more of a wild roller coaster. There maybe a lot of little things you can do, i see in IBD, the historic bearish big bank sector is already negative this year. Sure BAC, [C] Citibank are up this year, but have an amazing amount of legal troubles. Market Makers Edge book [Joshua Lukeman] used many multimonth charts; 5 minute candlechart may not help in bull or bear. NOT a prediction; wisdom is profitable to direct
Squeeze in volatility usually predict strong run on the next trading session - however it does not tell where the run will go, down or up. You may use Bollinger Bands or Bollinger Bandwidth to rack it.
Interesting question. They aren't that common. In the last eight weeks using swings of 6pts or more there were only 3 in the ES RTH. (well missing a chart for one week so 7) (Which I hadn't realized until you asked the question!) I think you would want to also look at those which were mostly unidirectional but with a countertrend move first.
Remember when US market was rallying every tuesday? Might be worth keeping track of the daily change to see if pattern like that emerges again. further ideas: First day of month when theoretically inflows from funds, could generate a trend day options expiry days (see exchange websites for calendars) also just being aware of the daily charts might help a little, e.g. market opens at 200 day moving average, and attracts buyers for the next 6 hours still imho this all adds up to marginal improvement over flipping a coin