A Daily Breakout represents an explicit technical event where an asset breaches the prior session's high and sustains that gain through settlement. To qualify as a daily breakout, a trading session must satisfy two mandatory conditions measured against the previous day's high:
Intraday penetration: today's high price traded above yesterday's high price.
Settlement confirmation: today's closing price finished above that same prior-day high level.
Both conditions are measured against one number, the previous day's high. If a session pushes above it intraday but closes back below it, only one condition holds and the day is discarded.
If a session misses either condition, it is discarded by the analytical engine.
Why settlement confirmation matters
The second condition, requiring the close to hold above the prior high, is what gives this metric its analytical weight. Many trading sessions push past yesterday's high early in the day, run out of buying pressure, and fade back below it before the bell.
Both days traded above the prior high. Only the one that closed there is a confirmed daily breakout; the other faded into the close and is a failed breakout, excluded from the dataset.
Sessions that push past the prior high intraday but fade before the closing bell are classified as unconfirmed intraday probes or failed breakouts, and are completely excluded from the dataset.
Calculating breakout magnitude
The height of a breakout is measured from the intraday high relative to the prior day's high, expressed as a percentage:
Breakout % = (Today's High − Yesterday's High) ÷ Yesterday's High × 100
Because today's high reached 2.35% above the prior high and today's close ($212.67) remained above $208.65, the session registers as a valid daily breakout.
Frequency & occurrence rate
Requiring settlement confirmation makes a daily breakout a far more selective event than simple intraday momentum:
Roughly 23% of trading sessions for an asset like NVDA qualify as true daily breakouts.
An almost equal number of sessions reach above the prior high intraday but fade before the close, all of which are filtered out.
A shallow breakout closing 0.3% above yesterday's high and an explosive breakout closing 5.0% above yesterday's high both qualify as daily breakouts, but they represent entirely different structural market events. The breakout engine uses magnitude matching to isolate historical precedents of comparable size.
Ranking breakouts by asset-specific severity
To ensure accurate historical comparisons, the system ranks every daily breakout an asset has generated across its history by its magnitude percentage:
Today's 2.35% breakout lands just short of NVDA's 2.63% median, at the 44th percentile of its own breakouts. The matched set is the breakouts closest in height to it, 73 in all, and the forward numbers are built from those.
Asset-specific distribution: every historical breakout for that ticker is sorted from smallest to largest magnitude.
Percentile placement: today's breakout is mapped to its exact percentile within that ticker's historical distribution.
Matched-set isolation: the engine isolates the historical instances that cluster tightly around today's specific percentile rank.
Magnitude profile comparison
Practical example, NVIDIA: a 2.35% breakout height.
Metric
Historical value
Contextual interpretation
Median NVDA breakout
2.63%
Baseline severity for a typical daily breakout in NVDA.
Today's breakout
2.35%
Sits at the 44th percentile, slightly smaller than average, yielding 73 matching historical days.
Why tickers are ranked on their own history
A 2.35% breakout height represents a routine event for a high-volatility stock like NVIDIA (NVDA), but would represent an extreme expansion for a low-beta utility asset, or a massive surge for a broad index ETF.
Core Backtesting Rule
Evaluated against its own history, every asset defines its own baseline for what constitutes a shallow, typical, or explosive breakout. This keeps backtested matches clean and asset-calibrated.
Magnitude dictates forward behavior
Shallow breakouts (~10th to 30th percentile): minor pushes past prior highs that often face swift profit-taking or mean-reversion.
Explosive breakouts (~70th to 90th percentile): powerful institutional buying pressure that often triggers momentum chasing, short-covering, or sustained trend continuation.
Isolating historical matches by magnitude ensures the forward projections reflect the exact severity of today's price expansion.
Chapter 3
Price Projections
The engine projects across three fixed horizons: the next trading day, one week (5 trading days) and one month (21 trading days). Every card shows the exact future date it refers to, so there is no ambiguity about which session is being measured.
Three measures on each card
Green / red odds: the split between matched days that closed higher and those that closed lower over that horizon.
Avg green return: the average gain of only the matched days that closed higher.
Avg red return: the average loss of only the matched days that closed lower.
NVDA's read after a 2.35% breakout:
Horizon
Target date
Odds
Avg green
Avg red
Next day
23 July 2026
37% / 63%
+2.10%
−1.78%
One week
29 July 2026
49% / 51%
+4.05%
−4.66%
One month
21 August 2026
47% / 53%
+9.80%
−9.02%
Measured on NVDA, 22 July 2026, from 73 matched days.
Always read the averages next to the odds
The two average rows are one-sided: avg green averages only the up outcomes, avg red only the down outcomes. Never read them by themselves.
The month row shows why. The odds lean slightly red at 53%, yet the average green (+9.80%) is larger than the average red (−9.02%). Slightly more of those months closed lower, but the ones that rose gained more than the ones that fell gave back. Reading only the win rate would miss which direction carried the bigger moves.
Chapter 4
The Three Charts
One Chart View toggle, three ways of looking at the same sample of matched days: the Price Cone, the Bar Graph and the Chart Log.
1. Price Cone
The default. It projects forward 45 sessions from today's price, drawing the percentile bands of what the matched days actually did, converted into prices.
Median line (50th percentile): the central outcome of the sample, not a target.
Cone width (10th to 90th): how much the matched days disagreed. A narrow cone means consistent outcomes; a wide one means high variance.
2. Bar Graph
This asks a different question: how often did price travel a set distance, and how quickly? You choose the move size, and the chart answers in both directions at once. Green bars above the line show the share of matched days that rose that far within a given number of days; red bars below show the share that fell that far.
By Touch vs By Close
Setting
What counts
Use it for
By Touch
Any intraday high or low that reached the level, even if price came back before the close
Path risk: stop-loss triggers or intraday margin
By Close
Only a daily close beyond the level
Settlement risk: holding-period targets or trend sustainability
Touch numbers are always equal to or higher than close numbers. A wide gap between the two flags heavy intraday movement that did not hold into the close.
3. Chart Log and the event register
The Chart Log shows the full price chart with every matched day marked, so you can see the wider context each time the same setup appeared. Below it, the event register lists every matched day with its date, both highs, how far above the level it pushed, and its forward return.
Any column sorts, which makes it easy to find the largest gains and worst drawdowns in the sample. Those extremes often matter more than the average when you are sizing a position.
The front page runs the same analysis across every ticker at once, so you can see which names broke out without opening them one at a time.
Breakout column
Second from the left. The header shows today's date against the previous session. Each cell carries the magnitude of the move together with today's high and the prior high, so the size of the move and the two prices that produced it sit in one place.
Price Projections
The same price projections from Chapter 3 appear here: avg green, avg red, and the odds, shown for next day, one week later and one month later.
Each figure is calculated from that ticker's own matched days. The numbers are therefore not comparable side to side in the way they look. Two rows both showing 47% are each describing their own stock.
Every column sorts. Clicking the odds at any horizon is the quickest way to see which of today's breakouts have leaned green historically and which have not.