The 50 best breakouts of 2008–2026

Our breakout backtest has 1,657 trades from 2008 to October 2026. Only 24% of them make money. The system works anyway because a handful of trades run for months and pay for everything else.

This post looks at those trades. We took the best entry in each stock and ranked them. Together these 50 trades made 854R, about 94% of the 910R the whole backtest made. The top 30 alone made 73%, the top 20 59%. The other 1,607 trades, taken together, roughly break even. (R is profit in multiples of the amount risked. +20R means twenty times the risk.)

For each one we look at three things on the day before entry: the stock score, the chart, and the market. Then what actually happened, with a daily chart of the whole trade and every execution on it.

How the trades are managed

Every trade follows the same rules. Buy the breakout with a stop under the base. When the stock first closes below its 20-day average, sell half at the next open. Sell the other half at the next open after the first close below the 50-day average. If the stop is hit first, the whole position goes. All but one of the 50 trades below sold half on the 20-day rule and rode the rest on the 50-day.

The list

S5FI is the share of S&P 500 stocks above their 50-day average. RSP/SPY 20d is how the equal-weight S&P 500 did against the normal index over the last 20 trading days. Both are explained in our post “Focus on what’s under the index”.

What they had in common

1. The charts looked ordinary

At entry, the best trades looked almost exactly like the average trade, and like the trades that got stopped out. Same volatility, same stop size, roughly the same distance from the 50-day average. You can’t pick the 50R winner from the chart on day one.

The two real differences are highlighted. The winners were already leaders, up a median 278% from their 52-week low against 242% for the average trade, and they were breaking out closer to their highs.

2. The market was in an uptrend every time

All 50 were entered with the S&P 500 above its 200-day average. Breadth was usually neutral to good: the median S5FI was 60, and RSP/SPY was above our −1.1% skip line for 45 of the 50. Big winners rarely start in a broken market.

3. High stock scores show up far more often than chance

Our stock score runs from about −5 to +6 and adds up eleven fundamental and valuation checks: growth for the price, earnings growth, free-cash-flow yield, sensible P/S and P/E, and penalties for guidance cuts, very rich valuations and mega-caps. In our system it sets the size: −1 or lower is skipped, 0 to +1 is the smallest size, +4 and up is the largest.

Only 3% of scored trades reach +4 or higher. 7 of the 48 scored trades in the top 50 did: APP, SMCI, SWKS, VRT, EAT, ELF, LULU. That is about 4 times more often than chance, and six of them are in the top 30. High scores cluster at the very top. When a fast grower is already profitable and not priced like one, the upside can be very large.

But the score doesn’t find the monsters. Half of the top 50 scored between 0 and +2, 15 scored below zero (QBTS, ZM, GEV, NVTS, DQ, COUP, IONQ, ZS, TGTX, TTD, KTOS, NTLA, FSLR, NTAP, NVDA), and the #2 trade, AMC in the 2021 meme squeeze, had nothing to do with fundamentals at all. Several low scores also just mean thin data (Farfetch, Shopify, Okta, Oklo, Teck). The score sets how much to risk. It doesn’t tell you which trade will be the big one. It was also designed using this same set of trades, so treat these numbers as description, not proof.

4. Some were luck, and that’s fine

Several winners had a big event soon after entry. Zoom reported earnings three days later. Moderna announced vaccine results eleven days later. Nvidia reported and announced its split two weeks later. Intellia published its CRISPR data a month after one entry and three days after another. Merck agreed to buy Verona eight weeks later, and Russia invaded Ukraine two weeks into the Antero trade. No screen sees those coming. A breakout system gets paid for being in strong stocks when the news hits. It doesn’t predict the news.

5. Our filters skipped 22 of the 50

Our full system skips trades with a stock score of −1 or lower, trades when RSP/SPY is down more than 1.1% over 20 days, and trades when S5FI is 80 or higher. 22 of these 50 winners fell into a skip: SMCI, VRT, QBTS, ROKU, ZM, GEV, NVTS, ELF, DQ, COUP, IONQ, ZS, TGTX, TTD, KTOS, NTLA, APPS, CHWY, FSLR, NTAP, NVDA, ETSY. They get more common further down the list: 10 of the top 30, but 12 of the 20 trades ranked 31–50, mostly because of the score rule. That’s the price of the filters, and it isn’t small. Over the full backtest they still raise the return and roughly halve the worst drawdown, because they remove far more losers than winners.

6. They were held for months

The median hold was 98 days, against 58 days for a typical winning trade. Selling half on the 20-day average locks in part of the move early; the half that rides the 50-day average is where the big R comes from.

7. They come in clusters

11 of the 50 started in 2020 and 9 in 2025. Momentum markets with a strong theme (AI infrastructure, quantum computing, the pandemic winners) produce the biggest runs, and they come in clusters.

The 50 trades

Each card shows what the system knew the day before entry. The stock score is the sum of eleven checks; the text says which ones fired. Average daily range (ADR) is the stock’s normal daily move as a percent of its price. Prices are adjusted for later splits.