analyzing steep jumps

I was pretty mad when the stocks I bought didn't go up instantly, like, the next day. Having to wait around for things to happen is not part of my plan for stock market success. I know there's a way, I thought, to buy stocks that are actually ready to move immediately. I went back to the charts, determined to find it.

In the charts, I started looking at any instance of a sudden jump in price, or a steep jump. In the stocks I'm looking at, there are lots of such examples, in charts of all types, from maximum long-term charts to maximum zoom intraday charts. I was not surprised to see they all looked similar, or as I would expect them to, but ... Now, a steep jump in price represents both possible profits, if I had owned the stock when it jumped, and the breakout move which signals even larger steep jumps - possibly much larger steep jumps - ahead. But can the two be distinguished? And, also, are there steep jumps which are neither thing, neither a trading oportunity - either because they don't represent enough of a price change, because of being parts of minute intraday patterns, or because they don't last long enough to allow a profitable exit - or, in the case of breakout moves that won't result in following action, because the surrounding pattern, the pattern history, doesn't have the required energy to produce a bigger move.

Regardless, I wanted to see if big jumps in price were immediately preceeded by recognizeable patterns. I was delighted to find they maybe universally were. It's a little tricky. The thing to look for is a breakout, which is a steep jump in relation to some preceding action. Then, you need to have some basis for determining what to do when a breakout occurs. I started making a catalog of pattern types, sketching out charts in a notebook. Thirteen pattern types recorded, with one or two examples of each type. I started to feel more confidence analyzing these patterns.

Ran 2 scans tonight, one for stocks 80% down (1 new stock), one for stocks between .95 and 1, 6 stocks, 5 of them new. Carefully recorded all scan results. Marked 4 to watch. Checked the best among older additions to the list, making some notes.