A Weekly Breakout represents an explicit technical event where an asset breaches the prior week's high and sustains that gain through the Friday close. To qualify as a weekly breakout, a trading week must satisfy two mandatory conditions measured against the previous week's high:
Intra-week penetration: this week's high price traded above last week's high price.
Weekly settlement confirmation: this week's closing price finished above that same prior-week high level.
Both conditions are measured against one number, the previous week's high. If a week pushes above it intra-week but closes back below it by Friday, only one condition holds and the week is discarded.
If a trading week misses either condition, it is discarded by the analytical engine.
Why weekly settlement confirmation matters
The second condition, requiring the Friday close to hold above the prior week's high, is what gives this metric its analytical weight. Many trading weeks push past last week's high early in the week, run out of buying pressure, and fade back below it before Friday's bell.
Both weeks traded above the prior high. Only the one that closed there is a confirmed weekly breakout; the other faded into Friday's close and is a failed breakout, excluded from the dataset.
Weeks that push past the prior week's high intra-week but fade before Friday's closing bell are classified as unconfirmed weekly probes or failed breakouts, and are completely excluded from the dataset.
Calculating weekly breakout magnitude
The height of a weekly breakout is measured from the intra-week high relative to the prior week's high, expressed as a percentage:
Weekly Breakout % = (This Week's High − Last Week's High) ÷ Last Week's High × 100
Because this week's high reached 3.19% above the prior high and this week's close ($154.42) remained above $150.00, the week registers as a valid weekly breakout.
Frequency & occurrence rate
Requiring weekly settlement confirmation makes a weekly breakout a highly selective event:
Roughly 29% of trading weeks for an asset like XOM qualify as true weekly breakouts.
An almost equal number of weeks reach above the prior week's high intra-week but fade before Friday's close, all of which are filtered out.
A shallow weekly breakout closing 0.3% above last week's high and an explosive weekly breakout closing 5.0% above last week's high both qualify as weekly breakouts, but they represent entirely different structural market events. The breakout engine uses magnitude matching to isolate historical weekly precedents of comparable size.
Ranking weekly breakouts by asset-specific severity
To ensure accurate historical comparisons, the system ranks every weekly breakout an asset has generated across its history by its magnitude percentage:
This week's 3.19% breakout lands well past XOM's 2.22% median, at the 74th percentile of its own weekly breakouts. The matched set is the weekly breakouts closest in height to it, 53 in all, and the forward numbers are built from those.
Asset-specific distribution: every historical weekly breakout for that ticker is sorted from smallest to largest magnitude.
Percentile placement: this week's breakout is mapped to its exact percentile within that ticker's historical distribution.
Matched-set isolation: the engine isolates the historical weekly instances that cluster tightly around this week's specific percentile rank.
Magnitude profile comparison
Practical example, ExxonMobil: a 3.19% breakout height.
Metric
Historical value
Contextual interpretation
Median XOM weekly breakout
2.22%
Baseline severity for a typical weekly breakout in XOM.
This week's breakout
3.19%
Sits at the 74th percentile, significantly larger than average, yielding 53 matching historical weeks.
Why tickers are ranked on their own history
A 3.19% weekly breakout height represents a substantial 74th-percentile surge for a mega-cap energy stock like ExxonMobil (XOM), but might represent a routine weekly fluctuation for a high-beta growth stock or cryptocurrency.
Core Backtesting Rule
Evaluated against its own history, every asset defines its own baseline for what constitutes a shallow, typical, or explosive weekly breakout. This keeps backtested matches clean and asset-calibrated.
Height dictates forward behavior
Shallow weekly breakouts (~10th to 30th percentile): minor pushes past prior weekly highs that frequently face profit-taking or consolidation the following week.
Explosive weekly breakouts (~70th to 90th percentile): decisive institutional buying pressure that often triggers multi-week trend continuation or short squeezes.
Isolating historical matches by magnitude ensures the forward projections reflect the exact weekly severity of the current price expansion.
Chapter 3
Price Projections
The engine projects across two fixed horizons: next week (5 trading days) and four weeks (about 20 trading days). Every card shows the exact future date it refers to, so there is no ambiguity about which week is being measured.
Three measures on each card
Green / red odds: the split between matched weeks that closed higher and those that closed lower over that horizon.
Avg green return: the average gain of only the matched weeks that closed higher.
Avg red return: the average loss of only the matched weeks that closed lower.
XOM's read after a 3.19% breakout:
Horizon
Target date
Odds
Avg green
Avg red
Next week
29 July 2026
58% / 42%
+2.73%
−2.42%
Next 4 weeks
19 August 2026
63% / 37%
+4.43%
−3.99%
Measured on XOM, 22 July 2026, from 53 matched weeks.
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 four-week row leans green on both counts: 63% of those weeks closed higher, and the average gain (+4.43%) was larger than the average loss (−3.99%). When the odds and the averages point the same way the read is clean; it is the rows where they disagree that need the closer look.
Chapter 4
The Three Charts
One Chart View toggle, three ways of looking at the same sample of matched weeks: the Price Cone, the Bar Graph and the Chart Log.
1. Price Cone
The default. It projects forward 6 weeks from today's price, drawing the percentile bands of what the matched weeks 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 weeks 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 weeks that rose that far within a given number of weeks; 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 weekly 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 week marked, so you can see the wider context each time the same setup appeared. Below it, the event register lists every matched week 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 this week against the previous week's high. Each cell carries the magnitude of the move together with this week'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 week and four weeks later.
Each figure is calculated from that ticker's own matched weeks. The numbers are therefore not comparable side to side in the way they look. Two rows both showing 63% 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.