Breakout Lab
A live, pre-registered paper forward test of the published CAN SLIM / VCP breakout playbook on US equities — the verdict, market regime, paper book, signals, and weekly watchlist.
What it is
The Breakout Lab is a live, pre-registered paper forward test of one of the most widely published playbooks in growth-stock trading: the CAN SLIM leader screen, Minervini-style volatility-contraction (VCP) bases, and pocket-pivot entries. Athena turned that playbook into a fully mechanical rule set, wrote it down, froze it, and now runs it forward on US equities every night — with hypothetical fills and no real capital — to find out whether the method actually delivers what the books say it does.
It is a research exhibit, not a signal service. The page shows the whole experiment as it unfolds: what the scan found, which setups are forming, every signal that fired, what a rule-following paper portfolio did with them, and — once enough evidence exists — the verdict.
Why a forward test, not a backtest
Chart-pattern methods are unusually easy to flatter in a backtest. The rules are discretionary in the source material, so whoever codes them gets to tune pattern definitions after seeing which ones “worked”, the famous examples are survivors, and it is hard to be sure a historical pattern was recognisable on the day rather than only in hindsight. A backtest of this playbook mostly measures how hard someone tried.
A forward test removes those degrees of freedom. The rules were fixed before the first session, the sample size needed for a verdict was fixed with them, and the test is look-ahead-free by construction: a setup is measured on one session, can only trigger on a later one, and is filled at the open after that. This is the same standard Athena applies to her crypto signals — see Data & Methodology — where the forward test, not the backtest, is the verdict.
What the page shows
| Section | What it shows |
|---|---|
| Header | The verdict state, the day count since the test began, the current market regime, and the last session the board covers. |
| Verdict | Progress toward the pre-registered sample — closed signal trades and elapsed sessions, each against its minimum — plus the running mean result per trade, its t-statistic, and a plain-language note. |
| Market regime | The playbook’s market-direction filter: the regime state, how long it has held, the exposure cap it implies, and for each index its close against its 50-day average and its count of distribution days. |
| Paper book | The rule-following paper portfolio: return, the gap to QQQ, MTUM and SPY over the same window, how much is invested, the worst drawdown, and any sizing penalty in force — then the equity curve against those benchmarks (all indexed to 100 at the start), open positions, and closed trades with their result in R-multiples and exit reason. |
| Signals | Every signal from the most recent sessions — type, variant, base pattern, grade, pivot, close, the volume surge, relative strength, and the regime it fired in. |
| Setups forming | Watchlist names currently building a base: grade, pattern, relative strength, distance to the pivot, how many contractions and how deep, the volume dry-up, earnings growth, the next earnings date, and a small price trend where available. |
| Weekly watchlist | The names that passed the weekend scan, strongest relative strength first, with whether each still passes the screen and whether a base is forming. Columns are sortable. |
| Signal ledger | Every signal paper-traded on its own, split by signal type, grade, regime at entry, and exit reason — count, win rate, average R, average percent and profit factor — plus forward returns by horizon, in absolute terms and against QQQ. |
How to read it
Grades
A base is graded by how many of the playbook’s three contractions are present as it tightens: price (each pullback shallower than the last), volume (trading drying up), and volatility (daily ranges narrowing). A means all three, B two, C one. The playbook claims the cleaner the contraction the better the breakout — the ledger’s by-grade split exists to test exactly that.
Signal types and variants
| Label | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Breakout | Price clears the base’s pivot — the classic entry. |
| Pocket pivot | An early, volume-backed entry inside the base, before the pivot is cleared. |
| Confirmed | The move came on a genuine volume surge from a proper buy point. The only variant the paper book is allowed to trade. |
| Low volume | Price broke out but volume did not confirm. Logged, never traded by the book — it tests the playbook’s claim that volume confirmation matters. |
| Extended | The breakout closed too far beyond the pivot to be a sound entry. Logged, never traded by the book — it tests the claim that chasing extended moves underperforms. |
Verdict
| State | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Accruing | The pre-registered minimum sample — both a number of closed signal trades and a number of sessions — is not complete. Everything on the page is provisional, and the numbers are noise. |
| Pass | Confirmed signals show a positive result per trade that is statistically distinguishable from zero, and the paper book beat QQQ over the window. |
| Mixed | Only part of that holds — the signals have an edge the constrained book could not convert, or the result is positive but not statistically distinguishable from zero. |
| Fail | Signal expectancy is not positive after costs. |
The criteria were fixed before the test began and do not move. A disappointing verdict will be published the same way a good one would.
Market regime
The playbook insists that most breakouts fail in a weak market, so the test reads the major indexes every night — are they above or below their medium-term trend, and are heavy-volume down days (distribution days) piling up? That produces one of three states: Uptrend (full exposure allowed), Under pressure (new positions are sized down), and Correction (no new entries and a sharply lower exposure cap). The ledger’s by-regime split shows whether the filter earns its keep.
The paper-book rules, in plain language
- Weekly scan. Every weekend the whole listed US common-stock universe is ranked by relative strength and screened for the playbook’s leader traits — an established uptrend, enough daily range to matter, a strong advance off the lows, and real liquidity. The survivors become the week’s watchlist. Each name’s earnings growth is recorded next to it for context; it does not decide admission.
- Setups. Each night the watchlist names are checked for a base forming, and each base gets a pivot and a grade.
- Trigger. A signal fires when a name breaks out through its pivot on a volume surge, or prints a pocket pivot inside its base.
- Entry. A confirmed signal is bought at the next session’s open, with slippage charged — never at the signal-day close. Positions waiting for that open are marked “enters next open”.
- Hard stop. Every position carries a protective stop from the moment it is opened. A gap through the stop is filled at the worse price, not the stop price.
- Time stop. A trade that goes nowhere for too long is closed to free the capital.
- Taking profits. Winners are sold into strength at the playbook’s profit target — unless the stock gets there unusually fast, in which case the eight-week hold rule applies: the position is held through the period with its stop raised to break-even, then trailed. A decisive, heavy-volume break of the medium-term trend exits any position.
- Market-regime exposure. The book is concentrated in a handful of names and builds each position in stages. Position sizes shrink when the market is under pressure, new buying stops in a correction, and — independent of the market — sizes are cut after a run of consecutive losers, with a short pause on new entries after a longer run.
Exits decided after the close are executed at the next open, the same as entries. Cash earns nothing. The exact parameters are part of the frozen pre-registration and are not published.
Why there is a ledger as well as a book
A concentrated book’s result depends heavily on which few names it happened to hold. So alongside the book, every signal — including the low-volume and extended variants the book refuses — is paper-traded on its own under the same exit rules, free of portfolio limits. That ledger is what the verdict’s signal test is scored on, and it is what lets the page answer the playbook’s individual claims: do A-grade bases beat C-grade ones, does volume confirmation matter, does the market filter help, and which exits do the work.
Data cadence
- Weekly: the full-universe scan and re-ranking run over the weekend and publish a fresh watchlist for the week ahead.
- Nightly: after the US close, the tracked names are refreshed, the regime is re-read, signals are logged, pending orders are filled at that session’s open, and the board is rebuilt. The page refreshes once a day — there is nothing intraday to watch.
- While the very first full scan is still running the page shows its progress instead of empty tables, and before the first board exists it shows a short “warming up” note.
- The page never displays raw price history — only the test’s decisions and derived values (grades, distances, R-multiples, indexed curves).
Access
The Breakout Lab is fully token-gated: connect a wallet, sign in, and hold the same $ATHENA threshold that unlocks the dashboard (see Access & Token Gating). Holdings are re-checked on-chain on every request. Visitors who are not connected, or are under the threshold, see the page layout with dimmed placeholder data — the tickers in that teaser are deliberately fake. The page is reachable from the link row under the dashboard’s Volatility Screener.
Everything on this page is hypothetical: simulated fills at the open with assumed slippage, no real capital, no real liquidity constraints, no taxes. Until the pre-registered sample is complete the results are noise, and even a completed test describes the past. US equities are not crypto — they gap on earnings and news, trade only in market hours, and can be halted — and nothing here is a statement about $ATHENA or any crypto asset. This is a published method being tested in the open, not a recommendation to buy or sell anything.