Does the market change a triangle breakout’s odds?
Version 1.0 · report 2026-09-22 · study recorded 2026-09-21

QUESTION AND FINDING
The wider market was associated with different triangle results. Upward trades won more often above the market’s long-term average. Downward trades earned more for their planned risk below it. Cropping a chart down to the triangle leaves out information that mattered in this historical sample.

METHOD
Frozen source: July 16, 2026 ledger, generated 2026-07-16T20:36:26.451077. SHA-256: e0d48452b9513c316932df99643c88a22437c466c996b812b45e46422f4abb91. Analysis recorded September 21, 2026.
Selection: Remove skipped rows. Deduplicate overlapping trades across all pattern families before selecting symmetrical triangles; unresolved trades reserve their occupied intervals. Keep completed trades with entry dates from 2000-01-01 through 2026-07-16 and planned risk of at least 0.3% of entry price.
Population: 12,360 completed symmetrical-triangle trades across 573 symbols, including patterns with and without flagpoles. No ascending/descending triangles, squeezes or wedges in the reported results.
Market rule: Prior-session SPY close at or above the 200-session simple moving average versus below it. The average includes that prior close and 199 preceding closes. All selected trades had market coverage.
Payoff and units: Mean R weights each trade equally after dividing its profit or loss by original planned risk. Charts multiply mean R by $100. The separate price-based payoff is the mean directional price change from each entry; for shorts, a price decline is a positive payoff. Neither is an account return.
Profit factor: Sum of positive R outcomes divided by the absolute sum of negative R outcomes: equal planned risk. It is not the ratio of the average win to the average loss.
Portfolio and costs: No portfolio slot limits, capital allocation, extra 2.5% portfolio risk floor, fees or borrowing costs. No market-filtered CAGR was calculated in this comparison.
Recheckable evidence: Preserved source ledger, classified trade rows, SPY closes and comparison script were available for this analysis. SPY snapshot SHA-256: 876d72efd070371cdfd7528f8e0f14ea3dc1eb9e6656bdaa2cb257187cea5408. The download contains group summaries, not individual trade rows.

SOURCE
Source: TradingPal’s triangle-only market-context analysis recorded September 21, 2026, using the preserved July 16, 2026 trade ledger and prior-session SPY closes. Figures are fixed for this article; they are separate from the changing product record.

LIMITATIONS
- These are historical simulations, not live investment returns or independently reviewed academic papers. Several trades share stocks and market periods, so the observations are not independent.
- Historical pattern confirmation can use information learned later. The available universe also underrepresents failed and delisted companies. These results do not establish performance on genuinely unseen data.
- Trading costs, slippage, stock-borrow fees and portfolio capacity are not deducted here. Daily bars cannot reproduce every intraday fill. A safety exit can lose more than the amount originally planned.
- This is one observational comparison. Market groups differ in dates, stocks, volatility and trade frequency. No confidence interval, independent holdout or causal effect is established here.
- The market study uses a different ledger and selection from the July 15 flagpole report. Their counts and rates must not be pooled.

CITATION
TradingPal Research (2026-09-22). Does the market change a triangle breakout’s odds? Version 1.0. Historical study recorded 2026-09-21. https://tradingpal.io/learn/research/triangle-market-context-study