Breakout Stocks Are Key to Crushing the Market Source: Leremy | Shutterstock Let’s think about stocks in their simplest terms. At any point, a stock is doing one of three things, right? It’s either going up, down, or sideways. By the laws of financial physics, those are the only three things a stock can ever do. That is the full extent of their behavior. Let’s extrapolate that further. If stocks only go up, down, or sideways, then that means stocks live their entire “lives” in four stages. Either: The stock is going sideways after going down. The stock is going up. The stock is going sideways after going up. Or the stock is going down. That, in a nutshell, is the simple pattern that all stocks follow. They are either in Stage 1 (bottoming, or going sideways after going down), Stage 2 (breaking out, or moving higher after bottoming), Stage 3 (topping, or going sideways after going up), or Stage 4 (declining, or going down after topping). If you look at the simple illustration above, the best investment strategy for any stock can be simply deduced.