Pocket Pivot
The Pocket Pivot is Gil Morales and Chris Kacher's early-entry setup: it detects institutional accumulation inside a base, before the obvious breakout.
The Pocket Pivot is Gil Morales and Chris Kacher's early-entry setup: it detects institutional accumulation inside a base, before the obvious breakout. The signature is a specific volume event - an up day whose volume is larger than the volume of every down day in the prior ten sessions. Selling has been drying up, and suddenly one day of buying overwhelms all of it: the footprint of funds building a position. Buying that day gets in earlier (and at a lower price) than waiting for the base's breakout, which is the setup's whole appeal.
It is a hard, trending, daily growth-investing strategy in the volume-breakout family.
How it trades
| Ingredient | Meaning |
|---|---|
| POCKETPIVOT() | 1 when the current bar is a pocket pivot (see criteria below), else 0 |
| SMA(10) | The 10-day moving average - both the pivot's "constructive area" check and the exit line |
Buy (institutional accumulation day):
POCKETPIVOT()
Sell (loses the 10-day line):
Close < SMA(10)
When it works best
Built for growth leaders under genuine institutional accumulation, where the volume signature means something. Its edge is earliness - it enters inside the base rather than on the breakout - and its documented cost is the complex calculation and the tight 10-day-line management: in choppy names or weak markets, accumulation days fail to follow through and the SMA(10) exit cuts them quickly.
Backtest this strategy yourself
Build these rules on the Free plan, adjust them, and see how they would have traded.