Rounded-bottom screens, first-try breakouts, and Fibonacci retracements

A pattern a screener cannot query

A rounded-bottom, or bowl, is treated as a visual U-shaped structure identified by eye on a chart. It is not a field a screener can query directly, so any search has to work around that limit.

The documented workaround was to screen first for a recent 52-week high and a volume increase, then inspect the remaining charts for a bowl or other bullish structure. That shorter list is the prefilter-screen: a compact set of quantitative conditions used to shrink the charts that still have to be judged by eye.

How a short list still left charts to inspect

Adding more than about 10 absolute screen conditions produced an empty result. A shorter set of price, 52-week-high, ownership, volume, and growth filters then returned 16 names.

Among those 16 charts, one energy name was preferred because volume-confirmation supported the bowl. A higher open the next session was treated as breakout confirmation: a move through a prior extreme, often a 52-week high, counted only after volume expansion and follow-through.

In a review of the prior year's ten largest winners, seven were said to have formed a bowl that completed with a breakout at 52-week highs. Several case charts showed the same completion into a 52-week high on expanded volume, often after a company-specific news or earnings event.

A first-try breakout, then exhaustion

The bowl is contrasted with patterns that may test a ceiling more than once. It is described as often breaking out on the first attempt and then advancing until momentum is exhausted.

Editorial reading: once the prefilter-screen has isolated a recent high and a volume increase, the rounded-bottom is no longer an untestable sketch. The first clearance of that high is the hypothesis. A later gentle retest is not the base case in this workflow.

When the thrust stalls

After the advance stalled short of a pre-set upside objective, a 3 percent trailing-stop was tightened on the decline. The first drop was described as more than 10 percent in as many days. A trailing-stop here is an exit that ratchets with price and is tightened once a rounded-bottom advance starts to reverse.

These breakouts, often in volatile micro-cap names, are described as able to reverse quickly near a one-third to 50 percent Fibonacci-retracement, especially where that zone already matches support or resistance. In this archive that pullback is the expected unwind after a first-try rounded-bottom thrust, not a second chance to prove the ceiling.