The Pullback Strategy That Helped Martin Luk Win The Us Investing Championship

TITLE: The Pullback Strategy That Helped Martin Luk Win the U.S. Investing Championship CHANNEL: Financial Wisdom DATE: 2026-05-29 ---TRANSCRIPT--- Hi all. In today’s video, we break down the pullback trading strategy of the 2025 US Investing Champion, Martin Luke. Martin Luke is proving to be an established trader. Despite suffering a brutal 50% drawdown early in his trading journey, Martin continued trading, refined his approach, and eventually dominated the US Investing Championship with a reported 969% return in a single year, following a 283% annual return in the year before. That’s significant cumulative returns over the two years. In our previous video, we covered Martin’s breakout and episodic pivot strategies as part of his broader trading framework. While several elements of his approach are inspired by Kristjan Kullamägi’s trading style, the pullback entry technique is a unique concept that Martin has developed and refined on his own. He began experimenting with the strategy in 2025, likely as an extension of his core philosophy. Risk as little as possible while maximizing the upside on swing trades. His tight stop-loss approach creates what he describes as a parabolic relationship between stop width and risk multiples. For example, tightening a stop-loss from 3% to 1.5% on a trade that eventually gains 25% can add roughly eight extra risk multiples. On a 50% winner, that same reduction in stop width can add nearly 17 additional risk multiples. This exponential improvement in reward to risk is why Martin is constantly refining his entries to reduce risk as much as possible without compromising the setup. Let’s understand which setups Martin looks for and the tools he uses when entering pullbacks. Martin primarily looks for major support levels within consolidations to enter pullback trades. To identify these areas of support, he combines both technical indicators and price action analysis. The indicators he relies on include AVWAPs anchored to important swing highs or lows, along with key exponential moving averages, such as the 9 EMA, the 21 EMA, and the 50 EMA. On the price action side, he pays close attention to previous highs and lows, as well as unfilled gaps that can act as important support zones. Martin focuses on buying pullbacks in strong stocks, not weak ones. He avoids stocks trading below declining 9 and 21 EMAs while making lower highs and lower lows. Instead, his approach is centered around finding temporary weakness within an overall uptrend. The goal is to buy a weakness in strength, and not weakness in weakness. Here is how to find setups that fit the strategy. First, you find a trending stock in a base. To find that, you need to run a scan of the best performers in the 1, 3, and 6-month time frames, focusing on stocks that have increased by over 30% during those periods. Pick the top 20 to 30% of the stocks from the list, sorted by their performance in these time frames. Those are the stocks with exceptional momentum. You can also add size filters like the market cap above $100 million or cash volume above, say, $1 million to further shorten the list and weed out penny and highly illiquid stocks. Then go through each one of the shortlisted stocks one by one to find stocks in consolidation. The best consolidations are often the longer ones over eight weeks that have a decent history of finding support and resistance at key AVWAP and EMA levels. For example, in IonQ in 2025, the stock went into this long consolidation losing some 67% from the top in 3 months. However, it then came back strongly rising 100% in the next 3 months. An AVWAP anchored at this top candle acted as a support here and a resistance here. While the 9 and 21 EMA started acting as strong support for the stock after it bottomed here. In such setups, Martin’s strategy is to buy the intraday dip to the support level when the price is bouncing back and reclaiming the support levels. In IonQ’s case, that moment came on these two days when the price went below the AVWAP anchored on this high and also briefly cut and reclaimed the 9 EMA. Those two indicators stacked together and acted as strong support with the price finally closing above these levels. An entry at AVWAP reclamation would have provided a trade with 7% stop loss and at 9 EMA reclamation would have given an even tighter entry with under 4% stop loss. The same AVWAP acted as a strong support 3 months later which coincided with the stock reclaiming this horizontal support level. An entry near the close on this day with the stop loss at the low of the day would have given an under 4% risk trade. The stock shot up over 125% from the entry level. An exit using a close below the 9 EMA would have given 76% profit, a 20x risk to reward. Let’s look at another pullback trade Martin took in Tesla. The stock was in a long consolidation of 5 months. It bottomed here, started making higher lows with this choppy price behavior, and then started surfing the 9 and 21 EMA with a tightening range. It then made this gap that was filled by this candle when the stock drifted towards the gap and the 9 EMA, but recovered intraday, taking support from these two support zones. An entry near the close or when the stock came back in the positive territory for the day would have provided an opportunity to enter with less than 1% stop loss. The stock was up 24% when it closed below the 9 EMA after this move. That’s a 24x risk to reward trade. Notice how buying a pullback gave a setup with such tiny risk. That’s the main aim behind buying such entries. Here is another of his trades. AMPX. The stock went into this base for over 2 months, bottomed here, and started making higher lows. It then reclaimed the 9 and 21 EMAs and also reclaimed the AVWAP anchored on this day. The AVWAP acted as resistance here, so it was natural to assume that it would also act a support in case of a pullback. In this case, both the AVWAP and the 9 EMA acted as support, and Martin bought the quick intraday flash on this day as the price reclaims the 9 EMA and the AVWAP. At AVWAP reclamation, the risk on this trade was 2.2%. And on 9 EMA reclamation, the risk was even less at 1.2%. The exit would have been a 40% profit trailing with 9 EMA and at 55% trailing with the 21 EMA. Here’s an example using SanDisk’s chart SNDK. The stock went into this two-month consolidation facing resistance at the AVWAP anchored at this candle which was the high of this move. The stock returned to strength after this down move with typical characteristics, higher lows, narrowing range, flattening to uptrending EMAs, and reclaiming the AVWAP. It then gave a super quick flush towards the AVWAP on this day with a stock touching the AVWAP and quickly rebounding. Had you waited to enter till the stock entered the positive territory for the day, the entry would have happened with 4% stop loss with a stop loss placed at the low of the day. The stock was up 126% when it closed below the 9 EMA after this move. That’s a 31X risk to reward trade. Let’s look at RMLD. It went into this five-month consolidation bottoms here, started making higher lows, reclaimed the crucial EMAs and started surfing on them. The AVWAP anchored at this high acted as resistance and the price returned to strength after it reclaimed the AVWAP. On this day, the price briefly cut the AVWAP and 9 EMA but closed above both. An entry at this flush would have come with 1.5% risk. The stock went up 45% before it closed below the 9 EMA, a 30X risk to reward. A trailing stop loss of close below the 21 EMA would have still kept you in the stock with 84% return. Here is another, SYRE. In this consolidation, the AVWAP would have been anchored at this high. The AVWAP acted as a brief resistance, but the stock bounced back strongly, reclaiming the AVWAP and surfing the 9 and 21 EMA while making higher lows. The quick flush happened on this day when the price took support on the rising 21 EMA and the AVWAP. An entry near the close would have come with a 3% stop loss. The stock was up 62% 20X risk when it closed below the 9 EMA and is now up over 80% from the entry point while still not closing below the 21 EMA in its move. The key to trading such pullbacks is this. Look for strength in a consolidation. Higher lows, EMA and AVWAP reclamation, rising EMAs with price surfing on them, and narrowing range. Look for an intraday flush on multiple support points. AVWAP plus EMAs or AVWAP plus horizontal supports or more such combinations. Buy the flush when the stock turns positive or if the close is above the support levels. Prefer entry points with super tight stop losses. Remember, the pullback buys with such tight stop losses fail a lot more than they work. However, the system still has super positive expectancy, as can be seen from Martin’s trading stats, because the wins are massive multiples of the risk. That’s the holy grail in trading. Martin could pull off such huge returns despite being wrong 85% of the time because his average win is close to 7x his average loss. So, when you pick up this style, get accustomed to being wrong a lot, and get the occasional home run, you can grow your trading account substantially. Our strategy follows similar principles, although using the technical aspects on the weekly charts, making it far more passive. For more on our strategy and how we find such stocks, see this video. And for a more detailed look at anchored VWAP, you may find this one useful. As always, thanks for watching.