Andrew Aziz and Bear Bull Traders: How the ABCD Pattern Works

Andrew Aziz is the reason a lot of people know what an ABCD pattern is. His first book has been in the day trading top sellers since 2016, his Bear Bull Traders channel has been running since 2017, and the methodology inside both is specific enough that you can write it on an index card. He is also, unusually for this category, a chemical engineering PhD who co-publishes quantitative research on the strategies he teaches. This is a plain profile of what he actually teaches, what the various ways in cost, and how the ABCD relates to the kind of structural read a chart grader can do. No affiliation, no affiliate links, and one section near the end where I say out loud what the tool I build does not do.

Quick Answer: The Method in One Paragraph

Who Is Andrew Aziz?

A chemical engineer before he was a trader, which shows up in how the material is organised. He holds a PhD in chemical engineering from the University of British Columbia and worked as an engineer in Vancouver until he lost the position in 2014, at which point he moved into trading. Two years later he published How to Day Trade for a Living, which became the book most people are handed when they ask where to start, and which has been published in 20 languages and a bestseller since 2016. Bear Bull Traders followed in 2017 as the community and channel around it, and is past 600,000 YouTube subscribers as of this writing.

Two things happened after that which most trading educators never get to. In 2020 he founded Peak Capital Trading, a proprietary trading firm based in Vancouver that trades US equities. And since 2023 he has co-authored a run of quantitative papers posted on SSRN with Carlo Zarattini and others, testing intraday strategies on large historical samples of US stocks. The 2024 paper A Profitable Day Trading Strategy For The U.S. Equity Market tested five-minute opening range breakouts across more than 7,000 US stocks from 2016 to 2023 and found the results depended heavily on restricting the strategy to stocks with unusually high activity that day, which is the same Stocks in Play filter the books teach. Whatever you make of the findings, running your own taught method through a peer-visible backtest with transaction costs in it is a different posture from posting account screenshots.

His other titles fan out from that first book rather than repeating it, and the ordering tells you what he thinks matters.

Three of the seven are about psychology and behaviour rather than patterns, which is a reasonable signal about where he thinks new traders actually break.

What Is the ABCD Pattern in Day Trading?

Four points, one rule. Price runs up from a low at A to a high at B. It then pulls back and puts in a low at C. The rule is that C has to be higher than A. If it is, you have a higher low inside a move that already worked once, and the trade is a long taken near C on the premise that the pullback is finished and the original direction resumes toward D. The stop goes at a break of C, because C breaking means the higher low was not a higher low and the reason you were in the trade no longer exists.

What makes it teachable is that every part of it is falsifiable on the chart in front of you. There is no interpretation about whether the trend is bullish in spirit. Either C is above A or it is not. Either volume faded on the pullback or it did not. That is the same quality that makes a bull flag useful, and the two shapes are close relatives. A bull flag is an ABCD where the B to C pullback is tight and orderly enough to look like a channel. Aziz teaches both, along with pullbacks into a rising moving average and reclaims of VWAP as the intraday reference line, which in practice are often the same trade described from a different angle. When C happens to land on the rising 9 EMA and on VWAP at the same time, that is not three setups. That is one setup with three reasons to like it.

The failure modes are worth naming because they are specific. The most common one is entering at B instead of C, which is what chasing looks like when you write it down: the move has already happened, you are buying the top of the leg, and your stop is now an entire pullback away. The second is redefining C downward as price keeps sliding, until the level you are calling a higher low is sitting under A. The third is taking the shape on a stock with no volume behind it, where the whole structure was printed by a handful of orders and the level was never really tested. That last one is the same warning that applies to reading any support level on a thin chart.

Stocks in Play and the First Two Hours

The pattern is the part people quote. The filter in front of it is the part that decides whether the pattern works. Aziz's term for the filter is Stocks in Play: names that are gapping before the open on unusually heavy volume, usually because something specific happened, and that are therefore going to move in a way a chart pattern can actually be traded on. The scan runs pre-market, the list is short, and everything else in the market is ignored for the day.

• Selection happens before the chart
  You are not scanning for ABCD shapes across the whole market. You pick a handful of stocks that are already active, then wait to see whether one of them offers the shape. Doing it the other way around produces a pretty pattern on a stock that has no reason to move, which is the single most common way a taught setup gets blamed for a bad trade.
• Volume is the qualifier, not the gap size
  A big percentage gap on thin volume is a wide spread and a level nobody defended. A moderate gap trading several times its normal volume is a genuine fight over price, and that is where the intraday structure holds up well enough to trade against.
• The first two hours carry the range
  The window right after the open is where volume and volatility concentrate, which is why the method lives there. It also means you are making the majority of your decisions in the period when you are least patient, which is exactly why the risk rules are written down beforehand.
• A short list beats a long one
  Two or three names you know the levels on will beat a watchlist of fifteen you are meeting for the first time at 9:31. The prep is the edge, and it is the part that transfers to whatever you end up trading.

This is also where his research and his teaching line up. The opening range breakout work he co-authored found the same thing the books assert, which is that restricting intraday trading to the day's genuinely active names changes the outcome materially. If you want the mechanics of the entry itself rather than the selection, the opening range breakout page covers the shape on its own terms, and the wider momentum trading playbook covers where high relative volume sits in the selection process generally.

How Does Andrew Aziz Manage Risk?

By deciding everything before the entry, which sounds obvious and is the rule most people break first. The stop price is chosen from the chart, at the level where the setup would be wrong, not from a dollar figure that feels tolerable. Position size then falls out of that stop distance rather than being picked first, so a setup with a wide invalidation gets fewer shares instead of more risk. A target is set at the same time. And sitting above the individual trades is a maximum daily loss that ends the session when it is hit.

The ordering is what matters. Choosing size before stop is how a trader ends up widening the stop mid-trade to avoid taking the loss they already agreed to, and the mechanics of doing it the right way round are the same ones covered in the piece on sizing a position off risk per trade. The ABCD gives this rule an unusually clean anchor, because the invalidation level is not a judgement call. It is C. Either the higher low holds or the trade was wrong, and there is no version of the setup that survives price trading through C, which removes most of the room for negotiating with yourself.

The daily loss limit is the least glamorous rule and probably the most valuable one in the whole method. Its job is not to improve any individual trade. Its job is to cap the damage from the state you get into after two losses in the first twenty minutes, which is when position sizes quietly double and setups get taken that would not have passed the checklist at 9:30. Worth being sober about the base rate here too, since no rule set changes it: the SEC's investor publication on day trading is blunt about how most day trading accounts do, whichever named method is behind them.

The Books, the Room, and What Access Costs

There are four separate things with his name on them and they are frequently blended together in conversation, which makes the cost question harder to answer than it needs to be. Splitting them out:

Those membership figures come from third-party review listings at the time of writing rather than from a price I can point at directly, so treat them as a range to sanity-check rather than a quote, and confirm on their own checkout page. The structurally interesting thing here is the order of the ladder. The full methodology is in a paperback. That is genuinely unusual, and it means the cheap version of the decision comes first: read the book, run the setups on a simulator, and you will know within a couple of months whether the style suits you before a recurring subscription is involved. If that sounds like an argument for delaying the purchase, it is, and it is the same test worth running before any of these programs. Write your current playbook on one page. If you cannot fill it, structure will help. If you can fill it and you still lose, the problem is execution, and that is the argument in why your strategy is usually not what is losing you money.

How He Differs From Cameron, TJR and Qullamaggie

These four names get compared constantly and the comparisons are usually about who is more legitimate, which is the least useful axis. What actually separates them is what they teach, over what timeframe, and what the commercial model is.

Against Ross Cameron

The closest comparison of the three, because both teach intraday momentum on the day's active names and both weight the session toward the open. The difference is the delivery and the credibility model. Cameron's program, covered in the Warrior Trading write-up, is built around live narration in a paid chat room and a course ladder, with the small-cap low-float end of the market as its specialty and the micro pullback as its signature entry. Aziz's is built around a published, documented method you can buy in a bookshop, with the ABCD as its signature setup, and the live room sitting on top as an optional layer rather than as the product. He then went on to found an actual proprietary trading firm and to co-publish research testing the strategies. Published author and researcher, versus live-narration mentor. Neither is inherently better. They suit different learners, and the book-first route is cheaper to try.

Against TJR

Almost no overlap at the level of vocabulary. TJR teaches ICT and Smart Money Concepts, which is a whole parallel language of order blocks, liquidity sweeps, fair value gaps and premium versus discount, laid out in the breakdown of what that framework actually says. Aziz teaches classic price action: support and resistance, moving averages, VWAP, volume, candlesticks. An ICT trader and an ABCD trader can look at the same chart and describe the same pullback in two entirely different dialects, one calling it a retracement into a bullish order block and the other calling it point C. That is genuinely worth knowing, because a lot of the online argument between those camps is people using different words for the same event and assuming they disagree.

Against Qullamaggie

The split here is timeframe and money. Kristjan Kullamägi's three setups, written up in the profile of his Breakout, Episodic Pivot and Parabolic Short, are selected off daily charts and held for days to weeks, so overnight gap risk is part of every position. Aziz's ABCD resolves inside the session, often inside the first two hours, and the position is flat by the close. The commercial side is the sharper contrast: Kullamägi states plainly that he sells nothing, so there is no purchase decision to evaluate at all, which is why that post cannot really discuss cost. Here there are books, a recurring membership and a firm, so cost is a fair thing to talk about and the ladder is worth understanding before you climb it.

Can a Grading Engine Read an ABCD Setup?

Being precise here, because this is the part where it would be easy to overclaim. SnapPChart has no ABCD detector. There is no field in the analysis that labels a chart with points A, B, C and D, no rule that implements Aziz's system, and nothing that will tell you "valid ABCD" as a verdict. If that is what you want, it does not exist here.

What is true is structural. The engine grades momentum continuations only: a long is a pullback inside an established uptrend, a short is a rally inside an established downtrend, and a chart in an uptrend never comes back as a short no matter how red the current candle is. An ABCD is, stripped of its labels, exactly a with-trend pullback. A to B establishes the uptrend leg. B to C is the pullback. C is the higher low the continuation is expected to launch from. That is the same category of setup the fields were built to read, which is why the shape and the read line up without either one having been designed around the other.

Concretely, the read covers trend structure and where price sits inside it, the support and resistance levels visible on the chart as price ranges, the pullback state as an observation, the exponential moving average relationship including which one and which way it is sloping, the VWAP relationship, and the volume behaviour. Point C is a support level plus a pullback state. The stop under C is a structural stop. The push to D is a continuation with or without volume behind it. There is even a verdict for the case where you are looking at the chart at B rather than at C, which returns as a wait-for-pullback call naming the level to wait for, rather than an entry. The general mechanics of how this works on a screenshot are in the overview of where AI genuinely fits into a trading process, and the product side lives at AI chart analysis.

The honest limits are the same ones that apply to everything here, and they matter more for this method than most. It does not scan, so it will not build your pre-market gapper list, which is the front half of Aziz's process and arguably the more important half. It reads the screenshot you give it and nothing else, so no tape, no Level 2, no catalyst, no live feed. It does not predict the next candle. And on thin low-float names, which is where a lot of intraday momentum lives, every static structural read is less reliable because the levels were printed by very few orders. What it does is apply the same criteria to the chart in front of you whether it is your first trade of the week or your third loss of the morning, which is the one thing your own read cannot promise. More on running that as a repeatable habit in grading a trade before you enter it.