Journal · 12 August 2026

Marking a breakout only after the daily close

On this desk a breakout is a close outside a range you already drew. The wick that pokes through at lunch is not the mark.

Students arrive with a habit of circling any bar that touches a line. The first two weeks of the Setup Desk are mostly the undoing of that habit. A breakout, as we mark it, starts with a box: the high and low of a contraction you can point to with a finger, drawn before the bar in question exists.

We use daily charts for this drill. An intraday poke above the box is recorded as a poke, in the margin, and then left alone. If the session closes back inside, the page stays a range. If it closes outside, you write the word breakout once, under the bar, and you note the direction.

The common error is the wick. A tall upper shadow looks decisive on a printed page because the ink is dark. It is still a shadow. We ask students to cover the wick with a finger and read only the body and the close. If the close is inside the box, the mark does not change.

Practice we actually assign: twenty daily charts of quiet ranges, marked in pencil, brought back on Thursday. We do not want a conclusion about what the market will do next. We want twenty boxes and a clear yes or no on whether the close left the box.

If you cannot draw the box the day before, you do not have a breakout to mark. That sentence is the whole rule, and it is the one Mirae repeats when the table gets loud.

The Setup Desk is where these rules are practiced over eight weeks. Back to the journal.