Measured Move Trading: How to Set the Target, and How Often It Was Reached

A measured move is a price swing in three parts: a first leg from point A to point B, a correction from B to point C, and a second leg from C that is expected to be about as long as the first. The target is C plus the length of A to B, for a bullish move; C minus it, for a bearish move. ChartSchool describes the bullish version as a three-part formation, a reversal advance, a correction or consolidation, and a continuation, with a correction that could retrace 33% to 67% of the first advance. It also asks for a prior downtrend for the first advance to reverse, and says the pattern usually forms over several months.

The chart applies one rule to the daily S&P 500 ETF from March to November 2025: among the measured moves found in the window, the one with the longest first leg. A is the April 7, 2025 low, B the May 19 high, C the May 23 low; the target line starts from C.

How to draw a measured move

1. Find A and B. The start and end of a clear first leg. To avoid choosing them by eye, use swing points: here, a swing low is a bar whose low is lower than the lows of the 5 bars before and the 5 bars after it, and a swing high the reverse.
2. Wait for C. C is the end of the correction, a swing point between A and B. By the 5-bar rule, C is only known 5 bars after it forms: before that, it is a guess.
3. Project the target. Target = C + (B − A) for a bullish move, C − (A − B) for a bearish one. In percent terms, ChartSchool also shows a variant that applies the first leg's percentage gain to C, which always gives a higher target in a bullish move, and much higher after a large one.
4. Set the stop beyond C. If price goes back below C in a bullish move, the correction was not a correction: the pattern is over.

How deep C may sit depends on the size of the first leg. ChartSchool ties the two together: "A 100% advance may see a 62% correction, and a 50% advance may see only a 33% correction." In other words, the bigger the first leg, the deeper the pullback you can accept before calling the pattern broken.

Two real cases from 2025

How often measured moves reached their target

To see how the construction holds up beyond two cases, we ran the rule over the daily S&P 500 ETF from January 4, 2021 to October 28, 2026 (1,462 sessions, dividend-adjusted prices) and over daily Bitcoin from March 8, 2025 to October 28, 2026 (600 bars). These are the daily series behind the charts on this site, not the longest history we hold: we kept them so that every count below can be recomputed from the same bars as the charts, as an automated check of the site does. A longer history would give more setups, not a different rule. Rules:

• Swing points with 5 bars on each side, taken in the order in which they are confirmed; a lower low found later does not replace a C that was already confirmed.
• A measured move opens when a new swing point C falls strictly between the previous two, A and B.
• From the bar after C, we follow price until it reaches the target (high at or above it, for a bullish move) or goes back beyond C. A bar that does both counts as a failure, because the order within the bar is unknown.
• "Before C" means the target was hit within the 5 bars needed to confirm C, the confirming bar included: a trader waiting for the confirmation could not have caught it.

On the ETF, the classic 100% target was reached before a move back beyond C in 29 of 59 moves, about half; on Bitcoin in 9 of 28. Five of the ETF's 29 hits came before C could be confirmed, so a trader who waited for confirmation would have seen 24. Of the 29 moves that reached the 100% target, the median time from C to the target was 15 sessions. These are counts of a rule on two markets, not the results of a trading system: they include no costs, the rule does not check for a prior trend or a minimum correction depth as ChartSchool does, and a move that failed first could still have reached the target later.

Only the count after confirmation is tradable. On Bitcoin, 11 of the 15 hits on the 61.8% projection came before C was known, which leaves 4 of 17.

How to trade a measured move

1. Enter after C is confirmed, on a close back in the direction of the first leg, not at the first sign of a bounce.
2. Stop beyond C. The distance from entry to C is your risk.
3. Check the reward against that risk. With the 100% target reached first in 24 of the 54 moves still open when C was confirmed on our count, a trade whose distance to the target is no larger than its distance to C has no edge before costs.
4. Use other targets as checkpoints. Old highs, a Fibonacci extension of the first leg, or the 61.8% projection.

The correction from B to C is a retracement, and the depth of that correction is what a Fibonacci retracement tries to anticipate. Swing points read by rule are a basic tool of technical analysis and of price action trading. Chart patterns built on the same three points, such as the AB=CD harmonic pattern and the flag, are measured on our bench; the method is described in how we test patterns.