Kristjan Kullamägi — known to most traders as Qullamaggie — is one of the most documented swing traders of the last decade. He started with somewhere around 5,000 euros in 2011, traded full-time from his apartment in Sweden, and crossed nine figures by 2020. He's posted his account screenshots, his trade history, and hours of free educational videos. There is no secret. The whole playbook is public.

What makes his story interesting isn't the size of the wins. It's how boring the strategy is. He trades three setups. He uses two moving averages. He holds for 3 to 30 days. He doesn't use options. He doesn't use leverage beyond standard margin. He doesn't even trade most of the time — he sits in cash for weeks waiting for the right environment.

The lesson isn't "do what Qullamaggie does and become a millionaire." The lesson is that a simple, repeatable, narrow strategy executed with discipline beats a complicated one almost every time. Here's exactly how it works.

The Universe: Where He Even Looks

Most traders' first mistake is having no universe filter. They look at any stock that flashes on a scanner. Qullamaggie's universe is incredibly narrow. He only trades stocks that meet roughly these criteria:

  • Small to mid cap. Generally under $10 billion market cap. The big winners come from names that can double or triple — mega caps don't do that.
  • Already up big. Stocks that have rallied 30-100%+ in the last 1-3 months. He's buying strength, not bottoms. The 6-month relative strength must be in the top 5-10% of the entire market.
  • Reasonable liquidity. Enough volume that he can get in and out without moving the stock against himself. Roughly $20M+ daily dollar volume.
  • In a tight consolidation. After the run, the stock has stopped going up and is digesting the move sideways for 1-4 weeks.

This filter alone removes 95% of the market. On any given day, his actual watchlist is 5-15 names, not 500. That's the entire game — be ruthlessly selective about where you look so the setups you do find are high quality.

Setup #1: The Bull Flag (Continuation Breakout)

This is his bread and butter. The setup works like this:

  1. A stock has run 30-100%+ in 1-3 months (the "flagpole").
  2. It then consolidates sideways or pulls back mildly for 1-4 weeks (the "flag"). Volume should dry up during the consolidation — that's the tell that sellers are exhausted.
  3. The flag should have lower highs and higher lows ideally, or just be a tight horizontal range. The key word is tight. Wide, sloppy flags don't work.
  4. Entry: when price breaks above the flag high, ideally on volume 1.5-2x average.
  5. Stop: just below the flag low or the most recent swing low. The setup tells you exactly where you're wrong.

The math behind why it works: stocks that have already rallied 50% in two months are being driven by real institutional accumulation. They don't round-trip back to the start. After a brief pause, the trend resumes — and resumption breakouts are statistically the highest-probability moves on the chart.

Setup #2: The Episodic Pivot (Catalyst Gap)

Qullamaggie's most famous setup. He coined the term "Episodic Pivot" (EP) for stocks that gap up on a major news catalyst — typically earnings — and then continue trending for days or weeks.

The criteria:

  • Catalyst. Real news. Earnings beat, raised guidance, FDA approval, contract win, takeover rumor. Not technical noise — actual fundamental information that changed the story.
  • Big gap on the day. Usually 10%+ at the open.
  • Massive relative volume. 5x average or more. That's how you know institutions are accumulating, not just retail panic-buying.
  • Closes near the high of the day. A stock that gaps up 15% and then fades back to up 3% by the close is a failed EP. The ones that work close in the top 25% of the daily range.
  • Holds the gap the next day. If it doesn't fill the gap on day 2, the move usually continues for another 5-15 sessions.

Entry: he typically enters either on the gap day itself (if it's clearly holding) or on a continuation breakout in the days that follow. Stop goes below the gap-day low. Risk is sized so that being wrong only costs 0.25% to 1% of the account.

Why EPs work: a major fundamental catalyst doesn't get fully priced into the stock in one day. Institutional buyers can't just slam in their entire position at the open — they need to accumulate over weeks without moving the stock against themselves. That accumulation creates the trend that day traders miss and swing traders capture.

Setup #3: The Parabolic Short

Qullamaggie also shorts, though he's the first to say longs are easier. The parabolic short setup is the inverse logic of EPs: a stock that has gone too far, too fast, into climactic volume.

  • Stock is up 100%+ in just a few days, ideally on increasingly weak fundamentals or a thin catalyst.
  • Final blow-off bar with massive volume that closes in the lower half of the day's range.
  • Short trigger: when price breaks the low of that climactic bar, or fails to make a new high after several attempts.
  • Stop: just above the climactic high.

This is the riskiest of his three setups and he sizes smaller on it. But when it works, the returns are violent — parabolic stocks tend to give back 30-50% of their advance within days.

Position Sizing and Risk: The Real Edge

Here's what most beginners miss when they try to copy Qullamaggie: the setups are 30% of the edge. The risk management is the other 70%.

His sizing rules, paraphrased from his own videos:

  • Risk 0.25% to 1% of account per trade. Even when he had a $50M account, he wasn't risking more than $500K on a single setup. Most beginners risk 5-10% per trade and wonder why they go broke.
  • Starter positions. He doesn't go full size on day one. He takes 1/3 to 1/2 size on the initial entry, then adds if the trade confirms with continued strength.
  • Sell partials early. He typically sells 1/3 to 1/2 the position 3-5 days into the trade, locking in profit while letting the rest run.
  • Trail with the 10 and 20 EMA. Once the trade is in profit, he uses the 10-day or 20-day exponential moving average as a trailing stop. When price closes below it, he's out of the remainder.
  • Cash is a position. When the market regime is bad (broad indices below 50-day, choppy chop, no follow-through), he simply doesn't trade. Some weeks he takes zero positions. Most retail traders cannot do this — they need action. That's the actual difference.

What He Doesn't Do

Maybe more important than what he does. Qullamaggie does not:

  • Trade options. He's said publicly he doesn't use them. He sticks to common stock.
  • Trade penny stocks under $5. The volatility is too random.
  • Bottom fish. He never tries to catch falling knives or call bottoms.
  • Use indicators beyond moving averages. No RSI, no MACD, no Bollinger Bands.
  • Trade earnings. He waits for the gap, then trades the continuation if it sets up. He does not hold through the print.
  • Trade everything. Most days he's watching, not trading.

The list of things he doesn't do is longer than the list of things he does. That's the lesson.

Why It Works

The Qullamaggie playbook works because every piece of it points in the same direction: trade with strength, in a strong market, on a real catalyst, with tight risk, and let the winners run.

Strong stocks in strong markets keep going up — that's momentum, the most well-documented anomaly in finance. Episodic Pivots work because real institutional buying takes weeks to play out. Tight risk means you can be wrong 60% of the time and still grow the account because the winners are 3-5x the size of the losers. Cash during bad markets means you don't bleed out waiting for the next opportunity.

None of this is novel. O'Neil wrote about it in the 1980s. Darvas wrote about it in the 1950s. Livermore traded variations of it in the 1920s. Qullamaggie's contribution wasn't inventing a new strategy — it was executing an old one with absolute discipline, posting his results publicly, and showing that it still works in modern markets.

How MAC Terminal Helps

The Setup Scanner is built around the same logic. Its scoring system rewards exactly what Qullamaggie looks for:

  • SMA compression (30 pts) — finds the tight consolidations that come right before flag breakouts.
  • SMA alignment (25 pts) — confirms the stock is in a clean uptrend, above the 10/20/50 SMAs.
  • Extension (25 pts) — flags stocks that have already moved but aren't parabolic, exactly the "after the flagpole, during the flag" zone.
  • Relative volume (10 pts) — surfaces dry-up volume during consolidation, the quiet-before-the-storm signal.

Combined with the Day Trade Scanner (which surfaces gap-and-go EPs in real time after 9:45 AM) and the Market Regime card on Overview (which tells you whether to be in or out of the market), you have the same workflow Qullamaggie runs manually — automated. You still have to do the hard part: sit in cash when the market's bad, take starter positions, cut losers fast, and let the rare winners run for weeks. That's on you. The terminal just makes sure you never miss the setup when it shows up.