There is a quiet genius in what this trader is asking for, and it has nothing to do with exotic indicators or complex algorithms. The request to track daily ES volatility, day of week, open, high, low, close, and the simple bullish or bearish close, is the foundation of real statistical edge. The questions about autofilling a cell based on price action and grouping days into weeks are not the musings of a novice; they are the precise, practical instincts of someone who understands that data without structure is just noise. This is exactly the right place to start, and the spreadsheet is the perfect tool for it, provided you treat it as a thinking partner rather than a storage bin.
The first question, about having Excel automatically label a close as bullish or bearish, is the kind of small automation that pays off in consistency. A simple formula that compares the close to the open and outputs "Bullish" or "Bearish" removes the temptation to eyeball the data or make judgment calls after a wild session. This matters because your weekly rhythm stats will be worthless if the labels are inconsistent. The second question, about grouping Monday through Friday into a single week, is where the real insight lives. You do not need a complex pivot table or a macro to do this. A helper column that identifies the week number, using the date and the ISO week formula, will let you sort and summarize by week. From there, a conditional format or a simple MAX and MIN lookup can flag which day of the week held the weekly high and low. That is not just a convenience; that is the beginning of a statistical model that tells you whether Monday's range is typically wider than Wednesday's, or whether Friday's close tends to be the week's extreme.
What this trader is doing, perhaps without fully realizing it, is building a repeatable process that will eventually answer questions like: "On days when the range is 50% larger than the 20-day average, what happens the next day?" or "If Monday is bearish and the weekly low is set on Tuesday, is there a bias for the rest of the week?" None of that is possible without the discipline of this first step. The spreadsheet is not a passive log; it is a scaffold for future decisions. The act of setting up the formulas and the weekly grouping forces you to define your terms, and that clarity is what separates a hobby from an edge. You are not just collecting prices; you are building a framework for your own behavior.
The practical takeaway here is that you do not need a $500 per month platform or a custom-built terminal to start developing a statistical edge. You need a spreadsheet, a clear definition of what you are measuring, and the patience to let the data accumulate. The formula for the bullish or bearish cell is a simple IF statement. The weekly grouping is a matter of adding a week number column and using a SUMIF or a simple table. The answer to whether the weekly high or low occurred on a particular day is a MAXIFS or a lookup. These are not advanced concepts, but they are the exact building blocks of a professional-grade tracking system. Start there, run it for a few months, and you will have a dataset that is more valuable than any indicator you can buy. The edge is not in the tool; it is in the questions you ask of it.