Breakout
Range Breakout
Price coils inside a tight range, then breaks out one side. The trade is a bet that the break keeps going. The risk this page is built to show you: it doesn't always keep going, and how often it does depends more on the setup than most traders assume.
Run the breakout
Set how tight the consolidation range is and whether volume confirms the break, then run it. Each run plays out one full breakout: the range, the break, and the result, continuation or fakeout back into the range. The dial on the right tracks your running odds across every run you've made.
How it works
The Concept, At A Glance
- The range does the work first. A period of tight, low-volatility consolidation means buyers and sellers have reached a temporary standoff. The tighter and longer that standoff holds, the more pent-up pressure there is to release when it finally breaks.
- The break is the trigger, not the confirmation. Price closing outside the range is what most breakout traders act on. It's necessary, it isn't sufficient, plenty of breaks fail within the first few candles.
- Volume is the closest thing to confirmation this setup has. A break on rising volume suggests real participation behind the move. A break on thin volume is more often a stop-run that reverses. The toggle above adjusts the simulated odds to reflect that difference.
- Tighter ranges tend to break harder. A narrow, well-defined range has less "inside room" for a fake move to travel before it's obviously failed, so genuine breaks from tight ranges tend to be cleaner reads than breaks from wide, sloppy ranges.
Where this breaks
The fakeout is the whole risk
A failed breakout doesn't just cost the trade, it often reverses hard enough to stop out anyone who bought the break, then continues the other direction entirely, the classic "breakout, then breakdown" trap. Run the simulator with a wide range and no volume confirmation and watch the fakeout rate climb. The strategy's entire edge lives in filtering out exactly that setup before it's taken, not after.