Qullamaggie's Trading Strategy: The 3 Setups, His Scan and How He Sizes Positions

Kristjan Kullamägi, known online as Qullamaggie, is a Swedish swing trader who has put his whole method on the internet for free. Three setups, one scan, a few risk rules and years of streamed sessions. This page lays it out with a date and a source on every number, because his own figures shifted between his 2021 posts and the 2026 book chapter, and most write-ups quote one set as if it never moved.

Quick Answer: What Is the Qullamaggie Strategy?

The rest of the method hangs off that frame. Sell a third to a half after three to five days and move the stop to break even. Trail what's left on the 10 or 20-day moving average. Keep any one position under 30% of the account overnight. Take the long setups only when the market itself is trending up. And expect to lose on most trades: by his own figures his win rate has run 25 to 35%, and a few large winners pay for everything else. None of it costs anything. His site says he sells nothing.

Who Is Kristjan Kullamägi (Qullamaggie)?

A Swedish trader who lives in Stockholm, per his own FAQ. He studied biomedical laboratory science at Karolinska Institutet for three years and started trading in the final few months of school. His About page puts the start in 2011, at age 23, day trading. He followed alerts and chased stocks, and by his own account managed to "blow up 3-4 times in my first 2 years," each time with $2,000 to $5,000 (per the FAQ). The 2026 Market Wizards chapter, per the Complete Trader's Edge summary, adds that the first stake came from a summer job as a security guard at the Nasdaq Stockholm building.

2013 was his first profitable year, and it's also when he started moving from day trading to swing trading off daily charts. His FAQ gives the reason in one line: when stocks make big moves, "it usually takes weeks and months." Swing trading meant less screen time for more money, and it scaled where day trading didn't. He says he became financially independent in 2017 and started streaming on Twitch in 2019. The tradeoffs between those styles are in the comparison of scalping, day trading and swing trading.

The performance numbers, with dates

Numbers about him get quoted loosely, so here they are with dates. His FAQ lists account balances that climb through 2020 and early 2021, ending at "$82M as of March 01, 2021." The 2026 Market Wizards chapter, as summarized by Complete Trader's Edge, puts the peak near $105 million in November 2021 and a giveback of roughly $60 million by mid-2022. And he says he started with a few thousand dollars, several times over. All of it is self-reported or book-reported, and none of it is an independently audited public track record. The setups are worth reading anyway, because the criteria are specific enough to test.

Where the setups come from

He doesn't claim to have invented them. He calls the episodic pivot "a setup I learned from Pradeep Bonde (Stockbee)", and his FAQ says he has been a paid Stockbee member for years. The breakout borrows from Bonde's idea that stocks move in short momentum bursts, and for chart study he recommends William O'Neil's How to Make Money in Stocks, per the Complete Trader's Edge summary. His must-read list is O'Neil, Darvas, Minervini, Schwager's Market Wizards books and Reminiscences of a Stock Operator. If the O'Neil side is new to you, the CANSLIM method breakdown covers his version, and the profile of Mark Minervini's strategy covers the volatility contraction pattern that the breakout overlaps with.

The part nobody copies: the chart database

By his own description, the edge came from homework. In the setups post he describes an Evernote database he worked on for 7 to 8 years, holding "a collection of thousands of them", built over what he estimates was more than 1,000 hours of going back decades through individual stocks. His FAQ tells new traders to do the same and spend at least a few hundred hours on it. Or, from the EP post: "you have to confirm that for yourself." That applies to everything on this page, including the parts I like.

The commercial part is short. His site says, word for word, "I am NOT running any paid service, any alert service and I don't sell anything". That's why this page isn't built like our review of Warrior Trading and Ross Cameron, which has to answer whether a paid mentorship is worth the money. Here the only question is whether the method fits you.

What Are the Three Qullamaggie Setups?

All three rest on one observation from his write-up of the three setups: the biggest winning stocks "tend to move in stair steps." A sharp move of 20 to 50% or more, then a pullback or a sideways stretch, then another move. Leaders do that over and over, and each setup is a way to get on at a point where the stop is close.

They also share a skeleton. Find a stock where something big has already happened, wait for the first minutes of a specific session to show its hand, enter off the opening range, and put the stop at the extreme of that day. Here are the three, with the criteria he publishes.

Notice what's missing from that table: oscillators, crossovers, any reason to be in a trade that isn't visible as price and volume. The whole method runs on price, volume, the 10, 20 and sometimes 50-day moving averages, and VWAP, which he calls "the only intraday indicator I really use." In his Chat With Traders interview he went further. Per the published notes on that interview, he said he thinks there is "an inverse correlation between amount of indicators and profitability."

How Does Qullamaggie Scan for Stocks?

Before any setup there's a list, and his breakout scan is one line in the setups post. He scans for "the 1 or 2% of stocks that are up the most" over three timeframes: 1 month, 3 months and 6 months. That's how he finds what's leading right now. The notes on his February 2021 Chat With Traders interview describe a wider version, the top 2% over 1, 3, 6, 12 and 18 months, with the hits filtered by liquidity and ADR. Either way, most of the market never makes the list, however pretty its chart looks.

Leaders, themes and stocks that hold up

The scan gets you candidates. What he wants out of them is leadership: strong relative strength, a hot group or theme, and a stock that holds up while the index doesn't. Per the interview notes, when a stock that's already gone up a lot "stops going down when the market goes down", that's what leading stocks do, and the best time to trade breakouts is right after a market pullback, when you can see which names held up. Asked in his blog comments whether he watches the market, he said yes, but individual and group action "trumps all," and many moves in that market were "pure theme/story."

Liquidity and ADR

Then liquidity. His FAQ says both his risk per trade and his position size depend on "the liquidity of the stock and conviction on the trade." In the EP post he mentions passing on some earnings gappers because they were too illiquid for his size. The interview notes say that as a swing trader he mostly trades mid and large caps, not the micro caps that run 200% in a day on hype. He doesn't publish a dollar-volume floor in anything I read, so set your own: your full size has to get in and out without moving the price. That bar is a lot lower for a $25,000 account than for his.

ADR is the other filter, and it comes back later as the stop cap. His FAQ defines it as "the average daily range in % over the past 20 sessions" and gives the TC2000 formula (he charts in TC2000): average each day's high divided by its low over 20 days, subtract one, multiply by 100. It isn't quite ATR, which measures true range in price terms and counts the gap from the prior close. The ATR guide covers that one. Why filter on it at all? In his words, all three setups are about "low risk entries on fast moving stocks." A stock that barely moves in a day can't deliver the multiples the method needs.

The last step happens before the bell. "You need to have a watchlist ready before the market open," he writes, with alerts set and the share count worked out. Episodic pivots come from a different list, built in premarket from a gap scanner (see below).

Setup 1: The Breakout

The bread and butter one, and the one he spends most time teaching. His post lists three steps. A big move higher sometime in the past one to three months, anywhere from 30 to 100% or more. An orderly pullback and consolidation with higher lows and a tightening range. Then a range expansion out of it. While it consolidates, price "surfs" the rising 10 and 20-day moving averages, and sometimes the 50-day.

How long should the base be? The 2021 post says usually two weeks to two months. The 2026 Market Wizards chapter, as summarized by Complete Trader's Edge, says he now looks for shorter ones, usually one to three weeks, and that longer bases aren't what he wants. Both are his, from different years, so note which one your checklist uses.

Volume isn't a numbered step in his post, but it runs through everything around it, and the interview notes say big volume increases the odds of a breakout working. On the chart that looks like volume drying up as the base tightens, then a breakout day where the bars tower over the last few weeks. A breakout on light volume is the one I'd trust least. The relative volume guide covers how to measure that against the stock's normal pace.

Entry is the opening range high on the breakout day: the high of the first 1-minute, 5-minute or 60-minute candle. One detail people miss is that the first 60-minute candle is only 30 minutes long, 9:30 to 10:00, because hourly bars line up on the hour and the session opens on the half hour. You also don't need an intraday chart at all. In his words, you can "just look at the daily chart and enter" as the stock starts to break out.

The stop rule is the most useful line in the whole method. Stop at the low of the day, and never wider than the stock's ADR or ATR. If the ADR is 5%, the stop can't be wider than 5%. That second clause is a filter dressed up as a stop rule. If the low of the day is more than one ADR away, you skip the trade. You don't widen the stop and you don't shrink the size to make it fit. The sizing section below works it through in dollars.

Exits are mechanical. Sell a third to a half after three to five days, move the stop to break even, then trail the rest on the 10 or 20-day moving average and exit on the first close below it. Which average depends on how fast the stock moves, and his advice for beginners is the 10-day. In a bullish market, he writes, moves of 10 to 20 times the initial risk are common if your setup selection is good. Those are the trades that pay for a 25 to 35% win rate.

The shape has variants (high tight flags, flat channels, symmetrical and descending triangles), and he says it works on weekly and on 1 and 5-minute charts too, where some call it the Holy Grail. The consolidation-then-expansion idea overlaps heavily with the volatility contraction pattern, and it's a longer-timeframe cousin of the bull flag and the high tight flag. What makes his version his own is the specificity: a named prior move, a named base length, named moving averages 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 he learned from Pradeep Bonde. His definition, which he notes may differ from Bonde's, is "a gap up of 10% or more" with massive volume near the open. Ideally the stock trades its whole average daily volume in the first 15 to 20 minutes (the EP post) or 15 to 30 minutes (the setups post), and preferably the volume is already there in premarket. Entry is the opening range high after the gap. Stop is the low of the day, no more than 1x the ADR or ATR and 1.5x at most, which is a little looser than the breakout's 1x. Trail with the 10 or 20-day once that average rises above your initial stop (the setups post also allows the 20 or 50-day).

What counts as a catalyst

His EP post lists the types: political and regulatory news, FDA and biotech events, contracts and partnerships, earnings and earnings guidance, and the sector EP, where a red-hot group gaps and runs without stock-specific news. The ones he focuses on, and says he's had most success with, are earnings EPs. For those he wants big growth, ideally triple-digit year-over-year earnings and sales growth (mid to high double digits works too), plus a significant beat against analyst estimates and guidance raised. Plenty of smaller names have no analyst coverage, and then, he says, you trust the numbers and the volume.

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, as he puts it in the EP post, institutions don't buy in one day. It can take them months to build a position. If the name already ran 200% into the print, the repricing mostly happened in advance and you're buying the last leg of it. He also notes that an EP on a stock that already made a big move off a previous EP can work, but fails more often and probably moves less. That filter is why this isn't 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 in the breakdown of the different types of gaps.

The volume requirement is the part you can check on a chart, and it's doing more work than the gap percentage. He calls volume "the #1 thing to focus on." A 12% gap on a third of average volume is a thin move that can fill. A 12% gap that trades a full day's volume before 10am is a fight for shares. It's the same relative-volume judgment described in how AI reads volume on a chart.

How he finds them

EPs come to you. A scanner for stocks gapping up in extended hours, then the news behind each gap: he names Seeking Alpha and Finviz as free options, and Koyfin and MarketSmith for earnings history and estimates. They cluster in a concentrated three to four weeks each quarter, during earnings season, which he says makes it the ultimate setup for someone with a job. Getting good takes a few earnings seasons (he says it took him 7 or 8).

Setup 3: The Parabolic Short

The mirror image, and the riskiest of the three. He calls it "by far the riskiest setup if done wrong." He looks for a stock up 50 to 100% or more in a few days or weeks on a larger cap, or 300 to 1000% or more on a small cap, usually up three to five days or more in a row. Then he waits for the crack instead of guessing at the top: short the opening range low on the 1 or 5-minute chart, the first red 5-minute candle if it runs straight up from the open, or a failed bounce back into VWAP. Stop at the high of the day, or a reclaim of VWAP if that was the trigger. The target is the 10 and 20-day moving averages, where these usually bounce.

"Don't be too early," he writes. The payoff is smaller than on the other two, more like 5 to 10 times risk against 30 to 50 times at best on breakouts and EPs, with a higher win rate if you wait for the clean ones. The CTE summary of the book adds that he never shorts day one of a run and rarely day two.

Shorting also needs shares to borrow. His FAQ says he gets "very good (and sometimes very expensive) locates" through his brokers, which most retail brokers can't match, and borrow fees, squeezes and halts all live on this side. If the mechanics are new, start with how to short a stock and the explainer on short squeezes.

His 2021 post also has a long version: after a parabolic drops 50 to 60% or more in a few days, buy the opening range high or the first green 5-minute candle for a bounce that can run 50 to 100%. The 2026 chapter, as summarized by Complete Trader's Edge, describes the setup as short only, mostly small-cap pump-and-dumps. Different years, both his.

The honest part: a continuation grade won't short the top

SnapPChart grades momentum continuations only. A long is a pullback inside an established uptrend. A short is a rally inside an established downtrend. On the default profile it picks the side from the established trend, not the last few candles, so it never shorts an established uptrend and never buys an established downtrend.

Apply that to a parabolic top. 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. On the default profile the read describes an extended uptrend, the grade gets pulled down for the stretch, and it comes back as a wait for a pullback or a skip, not a short. It won't call the top. That's how every reversal pattern on the site is handled, from the shooting star to the head and shoulders: the shape is context, and the reversal is never graded as a prediction. If your trader profile is set to short-only, the side is forced. The same chart is graded as a short and takes a Counter-Trend Setup warning that pulls the grade down and rules out an A+.

What it can grade is the phase after the top. 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 average or into VWAP is a standard inverse pullback and gets scored like any other continuation. That's usually days after the exhaustion candle, so the tool helps with the rallies back into resistance once the downtrend has formed, not the exhaustion top. If your edge is the first break, that part of the method is yours to run alone.

How Does Qullamaggie Size Positions and Manage Risk?

Most write-ups skip this part or quote one source, and it's what keeps the method alive through a 25% win rate. He sets the risk first, lets the stop decide the size, then caps the position. Risk is the dollars you lose if the stop hits. Position size is how much of the account sits in the stock. They're different numbers. A 0.5% risk can be a 5% position with a 10% stop, or a 30% position with a stop about 1.7% away.

His numbers, by source and year

His numbers moved a little between 2021 and the 2026 book, which is normal for an account that, by his own figures, went from a few thousand dollars to tens of millions. Here they are side by side. The 2021 columns come from his setups post, his EP post and his FAQ. The interview figures come from the published Chat With Traders notes, and the book figures from Complete Trader's Edge's summary of the 2026 Market Wizards chapter.

The stable parts are the ones that matter for a normal account. Risk well under 1% on most trades and rarely more than 1%. The stop at the low of the day, never wider than one ADR. No single position over 30% of the account overnight. The win rate and the first sale move with the year and the market. When his account was under a few million he risked 0.5 to 1.5%, which is still a long way from 5% of a $10,000 account.

A worked example: all three limits at once

Made-up numbers on one account: $25,000, risking 0.5% per trade, which is $125. Every trade has to pass three checks in order. The stop has to fit inside one ADR. The size comes from the stop distance. And the position can't be more than 30% of the account, $7,500, if you hold it overnight.

Case A is the normal one. At a $50.00 entry with the low of the day at $48.00, the 4% stop fits inside the 6% ADR, and the $3,125 position works out to 62 shares ($124 of risk after rounding down).

Case B is the one people get wrong. Sizing alone would happily hand you a $1,786 position at the same $125 risk, and that's the trap. The 7% stop is wider than the stock's 5% ADR, so his rule says skip it. You don't resize a trade until it fits.

Case C is where the overnight cap bites. A tight stop sizes to a third of the account, so you cap it at $7,500 and accept a little less risk. The cap exists because an overnight gap can jump straight past a stop, which is why his post allows more intraday.

Run your own numbers through the position size calculator with the low of the day as the stop, then check the result against the 30% cap by hand. The general method, for any setup, is in the guide to position sizing and risk per trade.

Why a 25% win rate can work

Because the losers are small and the winners aren't. He wrote that you can be "wildly profitable with having just a 25-30% winrate." A quick illustration with made-up round numbers: win 30% of the time at an average of 5R, lose 70% of the time at 1R, and each trade is worth 0.3 times 5 minus 0.7 times 1, or 0.8R on average. Cut the winners to 2R out of nerves and it becomes 0.3 times 2 minus 0.7, which is minus 0.1R. Same entries, same stops, and now it loses money. The breakeven win rate calculator shows where that line sits for your own numbers.

When Do the Qullamaggie Setups Work? The Market Filter

The long setups need a market that cooperates. His setups post says the 10 to 20x moves are common "in a bullish market", and the EP post says mastering a setup includes knowing "in which market conditions the setup works well and when it doesn't." The Chat With Traders notes are blunter. You want an uptrending or sideways market for breakouts, because in a downtrend you rarely get them, and the ones you do get almost always fail.

The concrete version is in the 2026 Market Wizards chapter. As Complete Trader's Edge summarizes it, when the index's 10-day moving average is above its 20-day and both are rising, he takes long setups. When the 10-day crosses below the 20-day, that's a signal for caution. He doesn't claim it's precise. Per the summary, his own estimate is that it keeps him out of bad markets about 80% of the time and in good ones about 80% of the time. The summary doesn't say which index, so I won't guess either.

The reason it matters is 2022. Per the same summary, he was heavily long at the November 2021 top, kept taking breakouts and episodic pivots through the downtrend that followed, against his own filter, and gave back roughly $60 million from the peak by mid-2022. His own counterfactual, as the summary reports it: following the 10 and 20-day rule would have avoided 90% of those losses. That's the book's claim about his account, and nobody outside can check it. The logic holds up without the number, though. The summary's reasoning is that most stocks move with the index, so long setups in a falling market get stopped out again and again.

The parabolic short is the exception. The CTE summary describes it as the one setup indifferent to market direction, which makes sense. It's a bet on one stock's exhaustion.

Applying the filter takes thirty seconds. Put the 10 and 20-day moving averages on the index your stocks trade with, check it before you look at a single setup, and when the 10-day is under the 20-day, the long setups wait. The guide to how AI reads trend direction and the bull vs bear market primer cover the wider read. A screenshot grade won't check the index when you upload a single stock. The index chart is a chart like any other, though: plot the two averages, screenshot it, and the read describes its trend.

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

Five things in this method are worth stealing whether or not you ever trade an episodic pivot. They're the same risk and selection habits that hold up across the whole momentum trading playbook.

• ADR cap
  A stop that can't be wider than the stock's average daily range turns risk into a pass or fail gate instead of a negotiation. Most bad entries die at this check, before sizing, before conviction, before you've looked at the news.
• Prior move
  Every breakout needs a big move to have happened already, 30 to 100% or more in the past 1 to 3 months. No prior move, no breakout trade, however pretty the base looks. (The episodic pivot is the exception: there the big thing is the gap, ideally in a stock that went nowhere for months.) Together with the 1, 3 and 6-month scan it removes most of the market on the first pass.
• Scheduled exits
  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 neither the urge to hold forever nor the urge to bank a green day gets a vote.
• Opening range
  Waiting for price to take out the first candle's high is a small delay that removes a lot of trades that never went anywhere. You give up the bottom tick and skip a lot of fakeouts.
• Market filter
  Two moving averages on the index, checked first. It's crude, and he says so. Per the book summary, ignoring it is what turned 2022 into his big drawdown.

What doesn't transfer as easily is the timeframe and the temperament. These are swing trades held for days or weeks, with overnight gap risk on every position and a hit rate that is low by design. Sizing off a daily-range stop also means you'll be smaller than feels right on volatile names, which is the point. And be 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're running.

The mistakes his rules are built to stop

• Chasing
  Buying day three of a move instead of the opening range coming out of a base. If price is already more than one ADR above the low of the day, the stop no longer fits and the low-risk entry is gone.
• Thin names
  Taking size in a stock you can't exit cleanly. He passes on episodic pivots that are too illiquid for his size.
• Early shorts
  Shorting the first red candle on a parabola. He waits for the crack and the failed bounce, and per the book summary never shorts day one.
• Adding
  Adding to a short that's going against you. His adds come on a failed bounce into VWAP, with a defined stop at the VWAP reclaim or the high of the day, not on the way up.
• Stops
  Ignoring the stop. He calls the parabolic short the riskiest setup for anyone who has trouble obeying their stops.
• Early exits
  Cutting winners before the moving-average trail says so. The arithmetic above shows how fast that turns a positive edge negative.
• Bad market
  Taking long setups while the index's 10-day sits under its 20-day. That's the 2022 lesson, per the book summary.

And test it before you size it. He built his database by hand over years. A smaller version, say every big winner from the last earnings season, is a start. The comparison of backtesting and pre-trade grading covers what a historical test can and can't tell you.

Which of These Setups Can a Screenshot Grade Actually Read?

I build SnapPChart, so here's the precise version. It grades one chart screenshot you upload. It has no live data, no scanner, no watchlist, no fundamentals, no news and no borrow data. Some of the Qullamaggie inputs live on the chart and some don't, and it's worth knowing which before you trust any read, including your own.

The top half of that table is the chart, and it's gradeable as long as the moving averages and the volume panel are on the screenshot. The bottom half (the 1, 3 and 6-month rank, the ADR number, the earnings beat, the borrow and the index regime) isn't, unless you plot or screenshot it. That half stays your job.

At the setup level, two of the three map cleanly onto how a chart grader reads structure, and one doesn't.

The reason two of them fit is that most of their criteria show up 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's the kind of thing a screenshot read scores, and the volume, moving-average and VWAP reads feed the grade. The moving averages have to be plotted on the screenshot for it to read them. The mechanics are in the write-up on how AI detects a breakout and in the wider overview of where AI fits into a trading process. The daily timeframe suits the workflow: nothing is ticking while you upload, so there's no pressure pushing you to skip the check, which is the usual failure on a 1-minute chart. For the product overview, see AI chart analysis.

What it adds is the same criteria applied to the base you're looking at, whether it's Monday or Friday and whether your last three trades won or lost. Your own read can't promise that. When the verdict is enter or wait, the read comes with a plan: an entry, a stop and a first target. A weak chart comes back as a skip with no plan to trade. It doesn't predict the next candle or the overnight gap, which is the risk that decides a lot of swing trades. More on running it as a habit in grading a trade before you enter it, the swing-specific version in AI for swing trading, and the end-to-end process in the AI chart analysis guide.