Auditing chart patterns by the first post-breakout swing

What a first-swing audit measures

A first-swing audit asks a narrow question. After the breakout, how far does price travel before the first pause?

The breakout is the close that leaves the pattern boundary and starts the measured run to the first minor-high or minor-low. A formation is treated as showing first-swing-trendiness when that first minor-high or minor-low appears well after the breakout, so price has already left sideways consolidation and begun a directional run.

Editorial reading: lock the pause rule first, then bring familiar reversals to that rule. The ranking table then records a measurement design, not a popularity contest among named templates.

Lock the lookback-window

The test defines a minor-high as the highest peak from five sessions before through five sessions after that peak, an eleven-session window. The matching valley rule defines a minor-low after a downward breakout.

That session count is the lookback-window. It decides whether a peak or valley qualifies as the first pause. Changing it can reorder a ranking table, so it has to stay fixed while names are compared.

How each rank is built

Each rank is the percentage run from the close on the session before the breakout to the first minor-high after an upward breakout or the first minor-low after a downward breakout.

The ranking used 37696 manually identified formations of 48 types collected from May 1988 through May 2012.

The tabulated runs stop at the first minor-high or minor-low and do not measure the last swing before a trend ends, so they are not a completed-trade result.

Familiar names on the same score

A head-and-shoulders bottom ranked 13 of 37 names on the upward first-swing list and stayed outside the top 10. A head-and-shoulders top ranked 22 of 35 names on the downward list. In this dossier, head-and-shoulders is a three-swing reversal template kept as a named setup to evaluate, not as a default winner on a first-swing ranking.

Eve-and-Eve and Adam-and-Adam double bottoms both appeared among the ten longest first-swing upward names, and an Eve-and-Eve double top appeared among the ten longest first-swing downward names. Those double-top-bottom templates, including Adam and Eve variants, are used here to test whether a repeatable price structure produces a long first run after the breakout.

A descending triangle appeared among the ten longest first-swing names after upward breakouts. A triangle-pattern is a contracting range, including the descending form, treated as a falsifiable breakout condition whose first pause can be scored the same way as other named patterns.

Why the table can move

Switching the lookback-window from five sessions to three or ten sessions changed some ranks. The first three upward names stayed the same, and only the diamond bottom stayed first on the downward list.

Two downward names near the top of the first-swing list were based on 109 and 92 samples. The write-up notes that more samples, a bull-versus-bear split, or another swing definition would likely reorder the table.

How to read the result

Editorial interpretation: the archive workflow is a first-pause measurement. Head-and-shoulders, double-top-bottom, and triangle-pattern names belong in the same table only because they can be scored with the same breakout, lookback-window, and first minor-high or minor-low. The table does not pick a favorite pattern, and it does not report a finished trade.