This is the most arithmetically explicit strategy in the collection. It measures a consolidation, projects that measurement upward as a target, and compares the projection against its own costs before deciding whether the setup is worth taking at all.

It shares its setup with two other strategies here, and what separates it is that it can decline a technically valid signal on cost grounds alone.

A Measured Move, Checked Against Its Costs

The strategy looks for a genuine consolidation: a range roughly between eight tenths of a percent and three percent tall, sustained over several intervals. Both bounds matter. Below the lower one there is not enough height to project into a worthwhile move; above the upper one the market is not consolidating, it is simply moving within a wide band.

On a break above the range high the strategy enters as a taker, since a break must be crossed. The target is a measured move — the height of the range added to the breakout point — which is a projection rather than an observed level, on the premise that a market emerging from compression tends to travel about as far as it was compressed.

The stop sits below the range, and a trailing stop takes over for runs that extend past the projected target.

The decisive step is a check the other breakout strategies do not make. Before taking the setup, the projected move is compared against the round-trip cost, and if the range is too narrow for the projection to clear that floor, the setup is skipped. A valid pattern with insufficient height is not traded.

Clean Consolidation, Then Expansion

The condition is a clean consolidation followed by expansion, which is the same condition Breakout Sniping, the Bollinger Squeeze and the Volatility Squeeze all wait for. Four of twenty strategies are looking at one market state.

What differs is the measurement. Breakout Sniping identifies a tight range structurally; Bollinger uses dispersion of closes; the Volatility Squeeze uses average range; this one uses the literal height of the consolidation as a percentage. Four instruments, one condition, and they agree more often than they disagree.

The explicit percentage bounds make this the most selective of the four in one specific way: it can look at a compression the others consider ideal and reject it for being too tight to pay. Where the others would take the trade and discover the outcome, this one declines in advance.

Cost as an Entry Condition

Both legs typically cross — a taker entry on the break and a stop or trailing exit that crosses too — so the round-trip is the expensive kind.

What makes this strategy distinctive is that the cost is an input to the entry decision rather than an outcome of it. The projected move is known before the trade, the round-trip cost is known, and the comparison is arithmetic. A range of eight tenths of a percent projects a move of eight tenths of a percent, and against a round-trip approaching one percent that trade cannot finish positive no matter how cleanly it works.

Recognising that in advance is the whole value of the lower bound. Without it, the strategy would take its most visually appealing setups — the tightest consolidations, which look the most coiled — and lose on them systematically while doing everything else correctly.

The upper bound protects a different thing. Very tall ranges project targets far away, and a distant target with a stop below a tall range is a wide trade whose failure is large. Bounding the range height bounds both the target's optimism and the stop's distance.

The Projection Is an Assumption

The measured move is the strategy's central assumption and it is not derived from anything. That a market travels roughly the height of its consolidation is a rule of thumb, not a property of markets, and moves routinely fall short or extend far past it. The target is a guess with a tidy geometric justification.

The trailing stop partly repairs the extension case: a move continuing past the projection is followed rather than cut at the target. It does nothing for the shortfall case, where price advances part of the way and reverses, and the trade closes at a stop having never approached its target.

The false break is the shared failure of all four consolidation strategies. Price exits the range, the strategy crosses to enter, price returns, and the stop exits — paying twice, having correctly identified a consolidation that then did not expand.

The overlap is the fleet-level problem. When four strategies read one condition through four instruments and all four fire on the same break, the position is four times the size on a single premise. They do disagree at the margins, because their measurements differ, and the aggregate exposure is still concentrated on consolidation-then-expansion far more than a count of twenty strategies would suggest.

The range breakout treats its own cost as an entry condition, which is the most disciplined thing any strategy here does. Its target remains a projection rather than an observation, and the tightest, most attractive consolidations are exactly the ones its lower bound exists to refuse.

Note: This explains how a process works. It is not legal advice, it is not specific to any debt, and it is not a substitute for a licensed attorney in your state. Rules and time limits vary by state and change over time — check the cited sources.