Our Breakout Engine gets busier after a bounce day like this

Today's market and our positions

SPY closed up +1.71% today — a real bounce after a rough stretch — and our three open trades absorbed it in three different ways. That's not an accident. You want positions that don't all move together, and today handed us a clean demonstration of exactly that. The system sits at -0.9% over 10 days against SPY's -2.5% over the same window. That's +1.6% of alpha, with a 100% win rate on the one closed trade so far. Nothing dramatic. But the positions are doing what they're supposed to do.

What our open trades are doing

GEO is the one carrying its weight right now. Entered on the Breakout Engine at $26.43 four days ago, it closed today at $28.62 — up 8.29% while SPY went essentially nowhere over that same stretch. The setup was a clean break from a multi-week base, and so far the follow-through has backed it up. This one's on the watchlist for all the right reasons. EVC is brand new — day 1 off the Relative Strength Engine, entered at $9.05, already showing $9.98 on the close for a 10.28% gain with zero help from SPY. An out-of-the-gate move like that can sometimes be a head fake, so we're not spiking the ball. But that's a strong opening statement from a new position. MRK is the honest one. Day 8, entered at $121.98, sitting at $120.54 right now — down 1.18%. Not where we'd like it. The one saving grace is that SPY is down 2.55% over that same window, which means we're actually beating the market by 1.37% on a position that's in the red. That's a strange kind of outperformance — and we're not going to dress up what it still is: a losing trade on paper.

Today's closed trades, post-mortem

No trades closed today, so there are no post-mortems to run. The closed-trade ledger still shows one winner — the one that holds the win rate at 100%. We'll update that number honestly as more data comes in.

What could change by tomorrow's open

MRK is the position we're watching most carefully into tomorrow's open. It's sitting below entry, and the Breakout Engine flagged it for a reason that hasn't fully played out yet. If the market gives back today's bounce, MRK has the least cushion of the three. EVC moved fast on day 1 — which is encouraging and also a warning: fast up and fast down tend to travel together on low-priced names, and some of that gain could come back quickly. GEO feels the most settled right now, but an eight-plus percent move draws sellers just as reliably as it draws momentum.

What we're watching tomorrow

The morning scan runs before the open, and after a bounce day like today the Breakout Engine tends to get busier. Whether any of those setups clear the threshold for a new position is still an open question — the system has standards, and a lot of things that look like breakouts after a bounce turn out to be noise. We'll see what it finds.