Day Trading Setups
First Pullback After Breakout
Two ways to trade the same level break: buy the breakout candle itself, or wait for price to come back and retest the level before getting in. Neither is free, one pays in missed trades, the other pays in worse fills.
Run trials, watch the real gap build
Each trial generates one fresh breakout of a real level. A Chase order fills at the breakout candle's close every time. A Wait order only fills if price actually comes back to retest the level, and some breakouts never look back at all. Run the trial to watch both play out on the same tape, then keep running more, the scoreboard below tallies real average R for each approach as the sample builds.
Click Run Trial to generate the first breakout.
Chase (enter at breakout close)
Wait (enter only on retest)
How it works
- Both entries share one stop, tied to the level. The stop sits a fixed distance below the broken level for both approaches, because a level that gets reclaimed has failed regardless of which price you got in at.
- Chase always fills, at the worst price of the trade. The breakout close is by definition the highest price paid, since the whole point of chasing is buying strength immediately.
- Wait only fills on an actual retest, and pays for the discipline in missed trades. When a breakout runs without ever pulling back, roughly two in five trials here, Wait books nothing at all, not a loss, just no trade.
- When both fill, Wait's R is mechanically better on identical outcomes. A lower entry against the same stop and the same target is a wider risk-reward ratio, every time, by definition, not by luck.
Where this breaks
Waiting is only free until the move you skipped never comes back
The runner scenario in this simulator is not an edge case, it is close to two out of every five breakouts. Every one of those is a trade Chase books a real gain on and Wait books nothing on, not a small loss, a complete miss. Averaged over enough trials the two approaches often land closer together than either camp expects, Wait's better price on the trades it does catch gets partly offset by the trades it never catches at all. Neither approach dominates the other in every market regime, which one wins depends on how often the specific instrument you trade actually comes back to retest its own breakouts.