Key takeaways · 5
- The dollar breakout flags a stock whose close minus its open, the candle body, cleared about 90 cents on the day. It is measured in raw dollars, not percent.
- It is the plain cousin of the 4% breakout. Where the 4% screen scales to the stock’s price, the dollar breakout uses a fixed floor no matter what percent that 90 cents represents.
- Because the floor is fixed, it reads very differently at different price levels. On a $12 stock, 90 cents is a large day; on a $400 stock, it is a rounding error. That is a property to use deliberately, not a flaw to correct.
- Like the 4% breakout, it is a same-day event rather than a trailing rank, and it catches first pushes and dead-cat spikes without distinguishing them.
- In the terminal,
dboreturns today’s dollar breakouts and shows the raw close-minus-open in dollars as its score. It is often run alongsidebo, the percentage 4% breakout.
What the screen measures
The dollar breakout looks at one thing on the most recent bar: the distance from the open to the close, in dollars. If that body, close minus open, cleared roughly 90 cents, the screen returns the name. It ignores the high and low, the prior session, and percentage entirely, which makes it the rawest of the Stockbee screens: a single measurement of how many dollars a stock drove from open to close today.
The word to hold onto is dollars. Every other momentum screen in the family normalises by price in some way, so a $10 stock and a $500 stock are compared on the same percentage footing. The dollar breakout deliberately does not. Ninety cents is ninety cents, whether the stock trades at twelve dollars or four hundred, and that is the entire point of having it as a separate screen.
The dollar breakout measures the candle body, close minus open, in raw dollars. A body of about 90 cents or more fires the flag, regardless of what percent that is.
Dollars versus percent
Both screens catch a strong up day, but in different units, and the unit decides which names each one finds. The 4% screen is a percentage, so it treats a 50-cent move on a $12 stock (about 4%) and a sixteen-dollar move on a $400 stock (also about 4%) as equivalent. The dollar breakout treats them as wildly different, because one is 50 cents and the other is sixteen dollars.
That makes the dollar breakout a lens on absolute range expansion. It surfaces sessions where a stock drove a large dollar distance from open to close, which tends to pull in higher-priced names having a heavy day and quietly pass over low-priced names whose percentage moves can look explosive on small dollar bodies. Neither behaviour is right or wrong. They are two cuts of the same tape, and that is why both screens exist side by side rather than one replacing the other.
In practice, people who care about a specific slice of the market lean on one or the other. A trader focused on higher-priced leaders finds the dollar breakout catches the heavy sessions the percentage screen dilutes. A trader hunting low-priced momentum finds the 4% screen more sensitive. Running both and comparing the two lists is often more informative than either alone.
Where the dollar breakout misleads
The fixed floor is the thing to watch. Because 90 cents is a small fraction of a percent on an expensive stock, the dollar breakout can fire on high-priced names having a perfectly ordinary day, and it can miss genuinely explosive percentage moves on cheap names entirely. If you read it as "a big day" without checking the price, it will mislead you in both directions.
And like every same-day screen, it settles nothing on its own. It sees today’s body and nothing else, so it cannot tell a breakout out of a base from a spike inside a downtrend, and plenty of dollar breakouts fade by the following bar. It marks a heavy session; the chart, the base, and the trend decide whether that session means anything.
How tickerstance uses it
In the terminal, dbo returns today’s dollar breakouts, with the raw close-minus-open distance in dollars shown as the score so you can see how large each body was. It is a same-day event flag, computed on the most recent bar.
It composes like the rest of the family. dbo rs>90 keeps only dollar breakouts in strong names; (dt or mdt) and dbo finds extended names that just drove a heavy dollar session; and it is frequently run beside bo, the percentage 4% breakout, to compare the absolute-dollar and percentage cuts of the same day. Like the rest of the per-stock screens, the dollar breakout sits outside Stance. On its own it is the bluntest member of the momentum family, a raw dollar body with no volume or trend behind it, so it earns its place as a second cut on the day rather than a screen to trade from alone.
Frequently asked questions
What is the dollar breakout?
A same-day momentum screen from the Stockbee family that flags a stock whose close-minus-open body cleared about 90 cents in raw dollars. Unlike the 4% breakout, which is a percentage, the dollar breakout uses a fixed dollar floor regardless of the stock’s price.
How is the dollar breakout different from the 4% breakout?
Units. The 4% breakout is a percentage that scales to price, so 4% is 4% at any price. The dollar breakout is a fixed 90-cent floor on the candle body, so it reads as a large day on a low-priced stock and a small one on a high-priced stock. Both catch a strong up day; they just disagree about which stocks had one, and running the two lists side by side is often more useful than either alone.
Why use a fixed dollar amount instead of a percentage?
To get a lens on absolute range expansion that the percentage screen cannot give. A fixed dollar floor surfaces sessions where a stock drove a large dollar distance from open to close, which pulls in higher-priced names having a heavy day and passes over low-priced names whose percentage moves look explosive but whose dollar bodies are small. It is a deliberate property, not an oversight.
How do I screen for dollar breakouts on tickerstance?
Type dbo in the terminal. It returns today’s dollar breakouts with the raw close-minus-open distance as the score. Combine it: dbo rs>90 for strong names, (dt or mdt) and dbo for extended names that just drove a heavy session, and run it beside bo, the percentage 4% breakout, to compare the two cuts of the same day.