Desk note · 4 September 2026
Mark the weekly high before you touch today’s sheet
The card on the Sunhwan-ro desk puts last week’s extremes on the page before anyone discusses the candle in front of them.
The first pencil mark
On the review card, step two is dull on purpose. You write the prior week’s high and the prior week’s low before the daily sheet is allowed onto the blotter. Students who arrive from a busy evening often want to start with whatever candle surprised them. The card refuses that start.
Minseo Park still says it the same way she said it in 2017, when the card stopped being rewritten every month: the week is the frame, and today’s candle is a guest inside it. If the guest is marked first, the frame gets drawn around the guest, and the page starts to flatter the latest print.
A Tuesday in Buk-gu
On a Tuesday in late August a student laid down the daily chart of a large KOSPI semiconductor name and began to talk about the opening gap. The weekly sheet was still in his folder. Jaehyun asked him to put the daily page face down. They marked the weekly high, which sat well above the gap, and the weekly low, which the name had not visited in nine sessions.
The gap, once the week was on the page, looked like a move inside a range the student already knew. He did not need a new line. He needed the old one where he could see it. That is the whole point of the step, and it is less exciting than the stories people tell about gaps.
When the weekly high is far away
Sometimes the weekly high is so distant that a student calls it useless for the day ahead. We still mark it. A far high tells you the day is not a breakout story yet. Leaving it off the sheet is how a quiet session gets narrated as a fresh extreme.
If three weeks pass and price never comes near that high, the later steps of the card allow the line to be retired. Retirement is a separate act, done after the close, not a reason to skip the mark at the start. The studio’s chart-review routine treats those as different jobs.
If the weekly mark feels too plain, sit through a Tuesday evening at the studio and watch how little else gets added once that line is already there.