Qullamaggie's Trading Setups: Breakout, Episodic Pivot, Parabolic Short

Kristjan Kullamägi, who most people know online as Qullamaggie, is one of the rare traders in this corner of the internet with nothing to sell you. No course, no alert room, no $5,997 tier. He publishes three setups, streams himself trading them, and that is the entire operation. Which makes writing about him a different exercise from writing about a paid program, because there is no purchase decision to evaluate. This is a methodology profile: what the three setups are, the exact criteria he publishes for each, and an honest note about which of them a continuation-only grading engine can read and which one it will flatly refuse.

Quick Answer: The Strategy in One Paragraph

Who Is Kristjan Kullamägi?

An independent Swedish-Estonian trader who started around 2011, initially shorting small caps intraday, and eventually moved to swing trading off daily charts. That transition is the interesting part of his history and it mirrors what a lot of people end up doing after a couple of years of getting chopped up on 1 minute charts. The difference between those two styles, and why traders migrate between them, is laid out in the comparison of scalping, day trading and swing trading.

On performance, here is the careful version. On his own site he describes having made tens of millions over the past few years from three setups, and the figure repeated across independent trading-education profiles is a starting account of around $9,100 grown to more than $100 million. That is self-reported and widely echoed, not audited, and there is no public track record you can pull. Treat it the way you would treat any unverified number attached to any trader, which is to say: it is not the reason to read the setups. The setups are worth reading because the criteria are specific enough to argue with.

The part worth stating plainly is the commercial one. His site says, word for word, "I am NOT running any paid service, any alert service and I don't sell anything" . The written breakdowns, the uploaded stream recordings, the live Twitch sessions, the Discord, all free. This is the main reason this page is not structured the way our review of Warrior Trading and Ross Cameron is structured. That one is a purchase decision about a paid small-cap mentorship with real tiers and a monthly chat room, so it has to answer whether the money is well spent. Here there is no money and no tier, so the only question left is whether the method fits you.

The Three Setups at a Glance

All three share the same skeleton, which is easy to miss when you read them one at a time. Find a stock where something big has already happened, wait for the market to show its hand in the first minutes of a specific session, enter off the opening range, and put the stop at the extreme of that day. The criteria below are the ones he publishes on his own write-up of the three setups.

Notice what is missing from that table: any indicator signal, any oscillator threshold, any reason to be in a trade that is not visible as price and volume. The whole method runs on prior move, base quality, volume, and two moving averages.

Setup 1: The Breakout

The bread and butter one. He wants a stock already up 30 to 100% or more over the past one to three months, because the premise is that whatever caused that move has not finished playing out. Then an orderly pullback with higher lows, consolidating anywhere from two weeks to two months, with price surfing the rising 10 and 20 day moving averages rather than slicing through them. The trigger is range expansion: the stock breaks out of that base and you buy the opening range high, choosing the first 1, 5 or 60 minute candle depending on how much slack you want in the stop.

The stop rule is the part most people skip and it is the most useful line in the whole method. Stop at the low of the day, and never wider than the stock's average daily range. That second clause is a position sizing rule dressed up as a stop rule. If the low of the day is further away than one ADR, the setup is not tradeable at your size, full stop. It kills the trade before you can talk yourself into a wide stop on a name you like.

Exits are mechanical. Sell a third to a half after three to five days, move the stop to break even, then trail the rest with the 10 or 20 day moving average and wait for the first close below the 10 day. That structure is what makes the strategy survive a low hit rate: most trades get cut small, the few that keep going get held for weeks.

If this shape sounds familiar, it should. The consolidation-then-expansion idea overlaps heavily with the volatility contraction pattern associated with Mark Minervini, and it is a longer-timeframe cousin of the bull flag and the high tight flag. Those pages cover the generic shapes on their own terms. What makes Kullamägi's version his own is the specificity: a named prior-move range, a named consolidation duration, a named moving average to surf, and a stop capped by ADR. The generic pattern tells you what to look for. His criteria tell you when to say no.

Setup 2: The Episodic Pivot

The one with the memorable name, and the one people most often get wrong. An episodic pivot is a gap up of roughly 10% or more on earnings or major news, with big volume behind it, ideally trading a full average day's worth in the first 15 to 30 minutes. He wants real numbers behind the gap, mid to high double or triple digit EPS and revenue growth, and he wants the stock to have been quiet for the past three to six months. Entry is the opening range high after the gap. Stop is the low of the day. Trail with the 10 or 20 day once it clears your initial stop.

Why the "quiet for three to six months" filter matters

Because the whole thesis is repricing. A stock nobody was paying attention to prints a number that changes the story, and it takes institutions weeks to build positions. If the name has already run 200% into the print, the repricing largely happened in advance and you are buying the last leg of it. That filter is the difference between an episodic pivot and a generic gapper, and it is why this is not simply a swing version of gap and go. A gap and go asks whether the stock holds its gap through the open. An episodic pivot asks whether something happened that will still matter in three weeks. The mechanics of gaps in general, including which ones tend to fill, are covered in the breakdown of the different types of gaps.

The volume requirement is the one you can actually verify on a chart, and it is doing more work than the gap percentage. A 12% gap on a third of average volume is a thin move that fills. A 12% gap that trades a full day's volume before 10am is a fight for shares. Reading that difference off the volume panel is the most mechanical part of the setup, and it is the same relative-volume judgment described in the write-up of how AI reads volume on a chart.

Setup 3: The Parabolic Short

The mirror image, and the hardest of the three by a distance. He looks for a stock that has gone vertical, up 50 to 100% in days or weeks on a larger name or several hundred percent on a small cap, typically up three to five sessions in a row. Then he waits for exhaustion rather than guessing at it: the first red candle, then a short at the opening range low, or a rally back into VWAP that fails. Stop at the high of the day, or a reclaim of VWAP if the failed retest was the trigger. The target is the 10 and 20 day moving averages, which is where these things usually find a bid.

There is a long counterpart to this, buying the recovery bounce after a collapse, but the short side is the one that gets cited and the one worth understanding first. Both are counter-trend at the moment of entry, which is exactly why the risk rules are tighter and the holds are shorter.

The honest part: a continuation grade will not take this trade

SnapPChart's engine grades momentum continuations only. A long is a pullback inside an established uptrend. A short is an inverse pullback, a counter-trend rally, inside an established downtrend. Those are the only two directions it will return, and there is a hard rule in the analysis prompt that says never pick short for a chart in an established uptrend even if the current candle is red, because that is a reversal trade and it does not take reversal trades.

Apply that to a parabolic top and the conclusion is unavoidable. A stock up 400% in nine sessions that just printed one red candle is, structurally, still in an uptrend. Higher highs, higher lows, price miles above a rising short-period moving average. Upload that chart and the read will describe an extended uptrend and an overextended long, not a short. It will not call the top for you, because calling the top is a prediction about a trend change that has not happened yet, and the engine does not make that call. This is the same treatment applied to every reversal pattern on the site, from the shooting star to the head and shoulders: the shape gets read as context, the reversal itself never gets graded as a prediction.

What it can grade honestly is the phase after the top. Once the parabola has actually broken, once lower highs and lower lows are on the chart and price is trading under a falling short-period moving average, a rally back into that moving average or into VWAP is a textbook inverse pullback and gets scored like any other continuation. That is usually several days after the exhaustion candle, which means the tool is useful for the second and third short in a downtrend and useless for the first one. If your entire edge is the first break, this part of the method is yours to run alone. That is a real gap and it is better said out loud than papered over.

What Transfers to Your Own Trading, and What Does Not?

Four things in this method are worth stealing regardless of whether you ever trade a single episodic pivot, and none of them are specific to his setups. They are the same risk and selection habits that hold up across the whole momentum trading playbook.

• The ADR cap on the stop
  A stop that cannot be wider than the stock's average daily range turns risk into a pass or fail gate rather than a negotiation. Most bad entries die at this check, before sizing, before conviction, before you have looked at the news.
• The prior-move requirement
  Every long setup requires that something big already happened. No prior move, no trade, however pretty the base looks. It is a filter that removes most of the chart universe on the first pass and it is the same idea behind the relative-strength screens in the broader momentum trading approach.
• Scaling out on a schedule, not a feeling
  A third to a half off after three to five days, stop to break even, trail the rest on the 10 or 20 day. The decision is made before the trade, so the part of you that wants to hold a runner and the part that wants to bank a green day are both out of the loop.
• Opening range entries as a confirmation, not a prediction
  Waiting for the market to take out the first candle's high before committing is a small delay that removes a large category of trades that never went anywhere. You give up the bottom tick and you skip the fakeouts.

What does not transfer as easily is the timeframe and the temperament. These are swing trades held for days or weeks, which means overnight gap risk on every position and a hit rate that is low by design. The method makes money on a small number of outsized winners, so if you cut winners at 1R out of nervousness you have kept all the losses and thrown away the mechanism that pays for them. Position sizing off a daily-range stop also means you will be smaller than feels right on volatile names, which is the point. It is also worth being sober about the base rate: FINRA is direct about the risks of active trading, and the SEC's investor publication on day trading is blunt about how most accounts do, whichever named method they are running.

Which of These Setups Can a Grading Engine Actually Read?

Two of the three setups map cleanly onto how a chart grader reads structure, and one does not. Here is the split, with no hedging.

The reason two of them fit so well is that the criteria are all visible in a still image. Trend direction, higher lows, how tightly the base has coiled, whether price is riding a rising moving average or chopping through it, whether the volume bars on the breakout day tower over the previous twenty. That is the exact set of fields a screenshot read scores, and the mechanics of it are covered in the write-up on how AI detects a breakout and in the wider overview of where AI genuinely fits into a trading process. The daily timeframe actually suits the workflow: nothing is ticking while you upload, so there is no pressure pushing you to skip the check, which is the failure mode on a 1 minute chart. The general product side lives at AI chart analysis if you want the neutral version.

The honest limits are the same ones that apply to everything here. It reads the screenshot you upload and nothing else. No live data, no scanning, no watchlist building, so it will not find the episodic pivot for you at 9:31, and it cannot see the EPS number that caused the gap. It does not predict the next candle or the next week. On the swing timeframe specifically, it has no view on the overnight gap, which is the risk that actually decides a lot of these trades. What it does is apply the same criteria to the base you are looking at whether it is Monday or Friday and whether your last three trades won or lost, which is the one thing your own read cannot promise. More on running that as a habit in the piece on grading a trade before you enter it, and on the swing-specific version in AI for swing trading.