Oda.krell: worst case would be the same as always: a market move in the wrong direction, fast enough to either mess up the trading engine on whatever rinky-dink service you trade on, leaving your stops unexecuted or at least exexcuted well beyond their set price.
That's the thing about betting on fast big moves - when those happen, the exchanges have a tendency to become unreliable.
You're completely skipping over the distinction I wanted to make, between 'worst case, in general' and 'worst case that is likely after breakout, in a sideways market', but okay...
Agreed that somewhere around [yellow box] or [orange box] was, approximately, the last time many traders would have concluded we have a breakdown?
That's more or less the scenario I'm describing above. Breakdown, on decent volume, followed by a bit of a disappointing 'fizzle'. And the difference between exiting with a profit or exiting with a loss is kind of narrow, but there's not much of a wipe out risk either.
If your point is that, in principle, you can
always be wiped out in margin trading, the answer is: sure. Always a possible. But my point was, under the current (comparably docile) market conditions, a big swing in the opposite direction of a breakout seems less likely, reducing the risk to be wiped out.