First 5-Minute Candle Breakout & Retest Strategy

Day trade Stocks, Futures, Options, or Crypto with this price action strategy. Uses the first 5-minute candle breakout and retest for entry on 1-minute charts.

Published · Updated · Methodology: Price Action

Part of: Breakout Trading

  • Methodology: Price Action
  • Content type: strategy
  • Timeframes: 5-minute (for marking high/low), 1-minute (for execution)
  • Markets: Stocks, Futures, Options, Crypto (when market is hot)

Source video

Decoded from: I Tried Day Trading With Only $50 by Scarface Trades — watch the original

Key timestamps:

  • 0:00 - Introduction to $50 risk strategy
  • 2:10 - Building a high probability strategy
  • 2:50 - Step 1: Mark out first 5m high/low
  • 3:18 - Step 2: Wait for candle close above range & retest
  • 3:54 - Step 3: Growing your trading account
  • 4:56 - Day 1: Best way to start (Bullish example)
  • 7:06 - Day 2: "One Candle" Scalping Strategy (Bearish example)
  • 8:18 - Day 3: Increase Winrate Using This Tip (Growth Strategy)

Strategy overview

Breakout trading treats a defined level as the trigger and the move through it as the signal; this entry adds the condition that turns it into a two-event setup — the break has to be followed by a return. The reference is the range of the session's first five-minute candle, and the trade is not the moment price clears that range but the moment price comes back to it. That second event carries the whole method: it converts an instant into a sequence, and it means the breakouts that run without looking back are ones this approach deliberately forfeits. Selectivity is bought with missed moves, and any honest assessment of the setup has to price both sides of that trade.

The source is not a strategy tutorial in the usual sense. Scarface Trades presents it inside "I Tried Day Trading With Only $50", a small-account challenge where the capital is the story and the setup is the vehicle — the video's own chapter list runs from marking the opening range and waiting for the retest straight into growing the account. That ordering is worth noticing, because account size is not a neutral backdrop for a method like this one: it governs position size, which instruments are reachable at all, and how much of a five-minute range's worth of movement is consumed by spread and commission before the idea gets a chance to work.

Two caveats travel with the format. The walkthrough shows a single bullish day, one example in the direction that happened to resolve — a demonstration, not a measure of how often the return to the range holds. And no machine-readable rules have been extracted for this entry, so what qualifies as a valid retest, how long the setup stays live, and what invalidates it are things the video itself is the only source for. The pairing of a 5-minute chart with a 1-minute one is the clearest structural hint on record: the level is drawn at one resolution and the sequence is judged at another.

Topics

trading strategy · pine script · tradingview strategy · price action · day trading strategy · 5 minute strategy · breakout strategy · retest strategy · stocks trading strategy · futures trading strategy · crypto trading strategy · options trading strategy · first 5 minute candle strategy · small account trading

Frequently asked questions

What is a first 5-minute candle breakout and retest strategy?

It uses the high and low of the session's opening five-minute candle as reference levels, then looks for price to break beyond that range and come back to it before the trade is taken. The retest requirement is what separates it from a plain opening-range breakout — the entry is the return, not the break.

Why wait for a retest instead of entering on the breakout itself?

Waiting for price to come back to the broken level is a filter: it asks the market to confirm the level from the other side before committing, and it usually allows a stop placed closer to the reference. The cost is real — breakouts that never return are trades the method never takes, so it trades fewer signals than a break-and-go version of the same idea.

Why does this setup use both a 5-minute and a 1-minute chart?

The two timeframes do different jobs. The 5-minute chart establishes the opening range — a level that only needs to be defined once — while the 1-minute chart is where the return to that level is watched and acted on, at a resolution fine enough to judge a sequence that plays out inside a single higher-timeframe bar.

Can you realistically day trade a $50 account with this method?

The video documents an attempt, not a result to expect: with a very small account, position size, minimum contract or share sizes, and per-trade costs constrain the outcome as much as the setup does. Before committing capital of any size, test the concept on historical intraday data — Strategy Decoder extracts the structure of strategies from video sources so you can evaluate them on TradingView first.

About this strategy page

This trading strategy was decoded by Strategy Decoder's AI from a public YouTube trading video and turned into a structured, reviewable specification. In the interactive app this page shows the full entry and exit logic, risk management settings, the indicators involved with their parameters, AlgoWizard-compatible logic and a Pine Script export ready for TradingView backtesting — plus an automated backtest verdict when one has been computed for this strategy.

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