PREMATURE & FALSE BREAKOUTS
Below two paragraphs are taken from Peter L. Brandt's Diary of a Professional Commodity Trader - Lessons from 21 weeks of real trading.
"A premature breakout is different from an out of line movement in the sense that a premature breakout can close outside of a predrawn boundary line and even spend several days in breakout mode. Prices then return back to the geometric pattern. However, the initial breakout was only a harbinger of things to come, and within a few weeks a genuine breakout occurs. I call these subsequent breakouts secondary breakouts or pattern recompletions." - Ch 3, page 38, Identifying the trades and the trading vocabulary
"Unlike the premature breakout, which is followed by a genuine breakout in the same direction, the false breakout results in prices either developing a much larger pattern or strongly moving in the opposite direction. Some traders refer to false breakouts to the downside as a bear trap and false upside breakouts as a bull trap. This means that traders who normally position themselves in the direction of the initial price thrust get stuck on the wrong side of the market." - Ch 3, page 40, Identifying the trades and the trading vocabulary
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