Chase

"Chasing" means buying or selling a stock only after it has already made a big chunk of its move, because you're afraid of missing out on the rest of it. The word describes the trader's behavior, not a special type of setup: you saw the price take off, hesitated, and then jumped in late trying to catch up to it.

It typically happens like this: a stock starts moving on some news or momentum, a trader watches it climb (or fall) without acting, and once the move looks "confirmed" or exciting enough, they finally enter — often near a short-term high (or low), right as the move is running out of steam. The entry price ends up far from where the move actually started, so the remaining potential reward is smaller while the risk of a pullback is the same or bigger.

The nuance that trips people up is that chasing isn't defined by a fixed distance or percentage — it's about the ratio between how much of the move is already "used up" and how much is realistically left, plus the fact that the group of traders who were pushing the price (buyers in an uptrend, sellers in a downtrend) may be slowing down just as you arrive. Recognizing that slowdown takes practice; from the outside, a chase and a legitimate breakout entry can look identical in the first few seconds.

Chasing is usually driven by emotion — fear of missing out (FOMO) or impatience — rather than a plan made in advance, which is why it's treated as a discipline issue in trading rather than a technical concept like a chart pattern.