Hi — thanks for visiting the Trends and Breakouts blog. I’m a part-time trader who does this after work, and my goal is simply to keep improving.

I started trading in 2018. I got lucky on my first handful of trades, felt the excitement, and got pulled in. Never blew up my starting capital, but after about a year of trading without a real plan I realized something: without a process, trading is either losing game or a huge time sink. If I want to make money from it, I need to understand how markets work, what real strategies look like, and how successful traders think — because “I read about this stock online, time to buy” isn’t a strategy.

Like most people, I went through the usual phase: videos and books about candlestick patterns, moving averages, oscillators, and indicator combinations. There were so many things you could trade, but it didn’t add up. Everyone can see the same “signals,” so if a simple pattern like the golden cross was the answer, it would be too easy.

It took me few years of studying to separate useful ideas from noise. The approaches that made the most sense were the ones that are repeatable and didn’t require watching every tick: trend following, swing trading, and momentum trading or a mix of it. Traders who spoke or wrote about kept emphasizing the same themes: risk control, position sizing, following the trend, and studying market history — especially the biggest winners.

During COVID, I had some extra free time on my hands, so built my own market screener tools. The idea was to live-test strategies I came up with and to better understand how indicators and rules behave in the real world — how to translate price action, trends, breakouts, and stop losses into something that can be tested and repeated.

Risk control and position sizing were  easy to turn into clear rules, because one is determined by account size and the other by your personal risk tolerance. The other two — trend following and studying the past — required time to review and finding a source. My goal was and still is to scroll through charts quickly and recognise whether something looks like a potential “winner” or whether it’s a ‘next’.

I tried to find large collections of past winner charts online, but most resources are limited: maybe 10, 20, 100 chart examples. That’s helpful, but it’s not enough for training your brain to spot good setups subconsciously. So I started building my own database.

For the last few years I’ve been compiling charts and data from the biggest winners of the past: when they happened, what the broader market looked like, and what news or events might have fueled the trend.

This blog is the resource I wish I had found 3–4 years ago. It’s a visual library for studying the past winners. I also study these charts myself.

Why focus on history? Others have said it better than I can:

• “History is simply the market’s memory; ignore it and you’ll pay tuition.” — Richard Wyckoff
• “Price archives are your competitive advantage; most traders never study them.” — Peter Brandt
• “Market history doesn’t repeat exactly, but its lessons repeat perfectly.” — Ray Dalio
• “Every chart you study is a rehearsal for a trade you’ll take someday.” — Bruce Kovner
• “Patterns reappear. The trick is training your eye to see them.” — Nicolas Darvas
• “Another lesson I learned early is that there is nothing new in Wall Street. There can’t be because speculation is as old as the hills…” Jesse Livermore
• “If you want to improve, stop chasing new strategies and go review 100 of your old trades.” – Adam Grimes

…and many more

Learn the pattern. Ride the trend. Keep the gains.