I've had one full read through of the interview from "Technically Speaking" with Stan and there's a lot of useful information in there that covers some of the grey areas from the book that we've debated on here over the last year. One section in particular on page 433 is worth writing out as it's a grey area we've talked about a lot:
Q: When you spot a stock breaking out of a base and moving from Stage 1 to Stage 2, how do you distinguish between a stock making a false breakout and the start of a true, legitimate uptrend?
A: "First of all, you really can't totally until after the fact, but we can at least have a hint into which one is more likely. If the volume doesn't pick up considerably, you have a big chance of a false breakout."
Q: Should we expect average daily volume to double?
A: "At minimum a double. Historically, if you go back the big winners have at least triple volume on the daily charts. I would say you are very unlikely to get a false breakout if you have double volume on a weekly chart and triple on a daily chart. The other thing that will help keep the false breakouts down is to make it close above the breakout. If you can give me these two things at the end of the day it would cut down the chance of a false breakout. Let's say a stock broke out at 20 1/8, went up to 20 1/2 and closed at 19 7/8 and the volume didn't pick up. The odds, and that's all we are dealing with is probabilities, are that this could be a false breakout if you get this type of thing. I don't like to buy a stock at 9:42 in the morning. I like to see how it's going to close at the end of the day."
Q: So you want a stock to close at its intraday high when it breaks out?
A: "It doesn't necessarily have to close at it's daily high but it has to close above the breakout. If the breakout was at 20 1/8, it should close above that. The higher in the day the better."
So that portion of the interview clarifies what I've taken from the GTA samples, in that the buy stop approach from the book was ditched, and you are nowadays looking for a close above the breakout level with at least a daily doubling of volume, and a close high in the days range to give you the best odds of a successful breakout. So you shouldn't be doing any buying of Stage 2A breakouts until very late in the day - probably the last 15 minutes or so to make sure these criteria are met. But you still need to consider risk reward tolerances, which is talked about later in the interview.