[isatrader]

A question, when you say 'if a stock hasn't run up too far...after monitoring it near the close...' are you implying that if a stock has a surge on increasing volume and never returns back during the day of breakout, then an opportunity is missed? Only stocks that don't breakout aggressively during the day of breakout, but do stick a landing/close above the breakout level should be invested in?

No definitely not, ideally you want the strongest breakout with a huge increase in volume, but unfortunately that makes getting in near the breakout level much harder and you'll often have to make compromises.

Weinstein's advice was referring to a trader entry. So he said to setup a buy stop order for a partial position to capture the exact breakout point, and then to do additional buying near the close it hasn’t run too far from the breakout level. I was suggesting a similar method, but using alerts instead of a buy stop order to access whether to open a partial position or not. You could of course open a full position straight away, but early intraday buying has an increased risk of a false breakout. But if it did close weakly on the day then you could immediately dump it.

He didn't give any guidance to how far is too far, but any additional buying at a higher price near the close would move your average entry price higher, so I'm assuming that you'd need to assess whether if would still be within your risk tolerances i.e. the distance to your stop loss point, as too whether you could add or not. Or you might need to reduce your position size in order to keep your risk at the correct level.