Toby Crabel: Opening Range Breakout and His Numbers

Few famous traders can be checked against their own numbers, but Toby Crabel can. His main program has run since March 1998, and every monthly return is listed in a public managed futures database. That turns claims into something you can recalculate.

We recalculated the full record of more than 28 years from the public monthly data and set it against the S&P 500. The result is more impressive and, at the same time, less comfortable than his reputation suggests. Add to that his 1990 book, which now sells for hundreds of dollars, and the opening range breakout he is known for.

His name comes up in every serious discussion of the best traders in the world, so the numbers deserve a close look. You will find the fund data, the book, the NR4 and NR7 patterns and my verdict below. This article follows our editorial policy. It is for education, not investment advice, and past results do not predict future returns.

Toby Crabel in 30 seconds

• Who he is: founder, Chairman and Chief Investment Officer of Crabel Capital Management. Michael Pomada has run the firm as CEO since July 2016.
• Track record: the program Crabel Multi-Product 1x gained 673.02% from March 1998 to August 2026, a compound 7.44% per year.
• Against the S&P 500: slightly ahead of the price index over the full period, clearly behind the index with dividends, and far behind over the last ten years.
• Risk: deepest month-end decline 16.26%, annual volatility 12.2%, correlation with the stock market 0.07.
• Assets: $5.0 billion as of February 1, 2026, down from $8.7 billion in September 2022.
• His book: “Day Trading With Short Term Price Patterns and Opening Range Breakout” from 1990 is out of print and rare.
• For private investors: hardly realistic. The main program has a $1 million minimum and requires Qualified Eligible Person status under US rules, so it is unsuitable for most small accounts.

Who is Toby Crabel?

Toby Crabel is an American futures trader, author and fund founder who has traded very short holding periods with fixed, predefined rules since the 1980s.

In trading circles his name almost always comes up in one context: the opening range breakout. Crabel measured this behavior systematically in the 1980s and derived rules from it that still sit inside trading systems today. What stands out is less the idea than the method: he counted instead of guessing.

That makes him one of the rare authors of trading books whose skill is documented in practice over decades. Most trading books come from people whose own results nobody has ever seen. Crabel’s fund returns are open for anyone to check.

From tennis pro to futures trader

Crabel did not start his career at the exchange but on the tennis court. At Florida Technological University, today the University of Central Florida, he was an All-American and reached the quarterfinals of the NCAA singles in 1977. In 1978 he reached his best world ranking in singles, No. 328.

He also played at a Grand Slam event. In 1980 he entered the men’s doubles at the French Open with Ian Harris. He never gave up the sport: in 2021, as top seed, he won the men’s 65 singles at a tournament in New Orleans.

His trading career began in 1980 in Chicago. At the brokerage firm RB&H Financial Services he traded customer accounts with a discretionary approach, close to the floor traders of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. According to his firm, that is where he became interested in a more quantitative method.

His research first went into a newsletter. He published the commodity advisory letter The Active Trader, and in the late 1980s a series of articles on short-term price patterns appeared. In the early 1990s he worked for Victor Niederhoffer at Niederhoffer Investments, while also managing a small customer portfolio of his own.

What Toby Crabel does today

Many articles describe his role in an outdated way, and so did older versions of our German article. Crabel no longer runs the firm day to day. He is Chairman and Chief Investment Officer, in charge of research and investment strategy. Michael Pomada became President and CEO in July 2016, after five years as COO.

Calling it a hedge fund is not quite precise. Crabel Capital describes itself as a research and technology driven firm for the systematic, automated trading of global futures and currencies. The industry term is managed futures, or commodity trading advisor (CTA). In practice that means rules decide, not opinions, which is the core idea of algorithmic trading.

In 2017 the industry honored him personally. At the Managed Futures Pinnacle Awards he received the Pinnacle Achievement Award, listed on his firm’s site as the featured award. The firm’s programs have won a long list of CTA performance awards since 2012.

Crabel Capital Management: history, programs and locations

The firm’s history is often reduced to a single year, and that year is imprecise. In 1987 Crabel formed Toby Crabel & Co. as a sole proprietorship, which later became today’s company. The firm names 1987 as its founding year, while its own website of 2013 still said 1992.

For traders, the later dates matter more. In 1992 the first program started, Crabel Diversified Futures. In 1998 the firm launched the program that is still its core and whose numbers follow below: Crabel Multi-Product.

What the firm manages today

The current figures are on the firm’s home page, and they tell a different story than the years before. Assets stand at $5.0 billion as of February 1, 2026. As of September 30, 2022 the figure was $8.7 billion, and as of October 1, 2024 it was $5.5 billion.

The team has shrunk as well. Crabel now names about 60 employees, roughly half of them in research and development. At the end of 2022 the home page said about 100. Taken together, both numbers show a smaller firm.

The asset figure is not a simple account balance. Crabel states leverage adjusted assets, including notional equity. In futures trading an investor only posts a fraction of the traded volume as margin, which is why the industry counts this way.

The four programs

Crabel has launched four separate programs over the years. Three of them started as sub-portfolios of the main program and follow different trading styles. Today the programs page shows Multi-Product, Gemini and Advanced Trend.

Program	Focus	Start as own product
Crabel Multi-Product	core program, broadly diversified	1998
Crabel Advanced Trend	trend following, flat fee	April 2014
Crabel Gemini	pure alpha, low correlation	July 2016
Crabel Contra	defensive component for custom portfolios	May 2019

Sources: crabel.com, Who We Are and Programs pages, retrieved October 9, 2026.

Gemini and Advanced Trend have also existed as European UCITS funds since October 2017. UCITS is the EU framework for retail funds, and both are offered through the MontLake platform. That lowers the entry barrier compared with the US program, but it replaces neither your own due diligence nor advice.

The firm trades from two main offices. The headquarters is in Los Angeles, the operations teams sit in Milwaukee. Between 2011 and 2013 Crabel added co-location sites in Chicago, New York, Frankfurt and Hong Kong, and it now trades about 250 futures and currency markets.

Toby Crabel’s trading performance

Now to the real point. The program Crabel Multi-Product 1x is listed in the IASG database for managed futures with every monthly return since March 1998. I evaluated the full series through August 2026: 342 months, or 28.5 years of trading history in one piece.

From March 1998 to August 2026 the program gained 673.02% in total, a compound annual return of 7.44%. These are net figures: IASG states that the returns include pro forma fees of 2% management and 30% incentive. A $1,000 stake grew to about $7,730.

These numbers differ from older figures, including our own. The 2019 version of the German article named 10.78% per year and 450.52% in total. Both were right at the time. The annual return has fallen since then because the last years were weaker than the first ten.

The record against the S&P 500

A return figure alone says little, only the comparison with the stock market shows its value. I compared the same window, end of February 1998 to end of August 2026, with the S&P 500 price index and with the total return index, which includes dividends. Crabel’s figures are after fees, the index figures have no costs at all.

Period to August 2026	Crabel	S&P 500 (price / with dividends)
Since March 1998	673.02%	632.47% / 1,123.09%
10 years	27.92%	254.05% / 317.93%
5 years	14.18%	69.95% / 82.54%
3 years	8.97%	70.51% / 77.35%
1 year	3.47%	18.98% / 20.38%

Sources: IASG monthly returns of Crabel Multi-Product 1x; S&P 500 and S&P 500 Total Return monthly closes from Yahoo Finance; own calculation, October 9, 2026.

Against the price index, Crabel is ahead by about 41 percentage points after more than 28 years. Few managers manage that. All drawdown figures here are month-end values; larger falls within a month cannot be seen in this data. But fairness requires the second column: with dividends reinvested, the S&P 500 returned 9.18% a year, clearly more than Crabel’s 7.44%. What matters is how the return was earned.

The deepest month-end decline was 16.26%, from April to August 1998. Over the same period the S&P 500 fell 46% on monthly closes from 2000 to 2002 and 53% from 2007 to 2009. The correlation with the stock market is 0.07, practically zero.

Crabel’s real achievement is therefore not the return but a similar return with a fraction of the drawdown and without dependence on the stock market. That is the value for a portfolio: a component that moves independently of stocks smooths the swings of total wealth. This is why institutional investors buy such programs, not for the absolute return.

The strong years and the weak years

The record splits into two very different parts. From 1998 to 2007 the program closed ten years in a row in profit, although 1998 only covers March to December. The best of them was 2007 with 32.90%. After that, things became much quieter.

Since 2008 there have been seven losing years: 2008, 2009, 2011, 2015, 2017, 2020 and 2025. Most of them were small, under 2.5%. 2025 was different: with a loss of 6.25% it was the worst calendar year of the whole series. From January to August 2026 the program gained 4.86%.

One statement from the old German version needs a correction. It said the decline from April to August 1998 was the longest and that losses were always recovered quickly. That is wrong. It was the deepest, but it lasted four months and was recovered in one month.

The really long setback began in April 2013. At 14.25% it was shallower and took five months to reach its low. The program stayed below its April 2013 peak for 34 months, until February 2016; the recovery from the September 2013 low alone took 29 months, almost three years under water in total. Our guide to risk management explains why this number matters so much.

The current setback is not over yet. From a high in April 2025 the program fell 8.25% by November 2025. At the end of August 2026 it was still about 3.3% below that high.

The worst single month was September 2001, with a loss of 9.81%. The best was September 1998, with a gain of 39.36%, during the crisis around the hedge fund LTCM. Both extremes came in weeks when markets lost their usual patterns.

Over the whole series, 60.82% of all months closed with a gain. That is 208 of 342 months and a useful expectation: even a very good system is behind in about four out of ten months. Anyone who expects a profit every month expects something no professional delivers.

The 1990 book and what it costs today

Crabel’s reputation rests to a large extent on a single book. It was published in 1990 by Traders Press in Greenville, South Carolina, has 288 pages and the ISBN 0-934380-17-1. The full title is “Day Trading With Short Term Price Patterns and Opening Range Breakout”.

The book is not a how-to guide but a statistical study. According to the publisher’s description it has five parts: opening range breakouts, short-term price patterns, patterns of expansion and contraction of the daily range, combinations of both, and where the open and close fall within a price bar. Each part includes computer tests.

And here is the practical problem: the book has been out of print for decades. On October 9, 2026, AbeBooks.com listed two copies: one in good condition for $795 and a signed copy for $1,800. There is no regular new edition.

That explains why so many people search for a PDF. Such copies circulate, but the book is protected by copyright and we do not link to them. If you want the core idea without spending hundreds of dollars, you will find it in the next section and in our guide to breakout trading, which covers the opening range breakout in general.

One honest note: the book is more than 35 years old. Its tests come from a time without high-frequency trading and without today’s volumes. The way of thinking still holds, the hit rates of that time do not carry over.

Crabel’s approach: opening range breakout, NR4 and NR7

The opening range breakout is an entry that triggers when price leaves a defined range around the open of the trading day, up or down.

Today most traders mark the high and low of the first minutes, but Crabel used a different yardstick. In his version, as Thom Hartle described it in Active Trader magazine in April 2003, the trigger is the opening price plus or minus a value he called the stretch. The stretch is the 10-day average of the smaller of two distances: open to high, or open to low.

The entry follows simple rules. You place a buy stop just above the open plus the stretch and a sell stop just below the open minus the stretch. The first stop that fills is the trade, the other one becomes the protective stop. If the trend is clearly up or down, the variant called ORB preference only uses the stop in the trend direction.

Crabel also paid close attention to the clock. The earlier in the session the entry stop is hit, the more likely the trade is profitable at the close. Positions filled late in the day are suspect, and Hartle suggests reducing size as the day goes on.

The second building block is the selection of days. Crabel does not trade every breakout. He looks for days on which the daily range has contracted sharply. His observation: narrow days are followed more often than average by wide days.

His best-known filters are NR4, NR7 and ID/NR4. An NR7 day has the narrowest range of the last seven days, an NR4 day the narrowest of the last four. ID/NR4 adds the inside day: high and low lie within the previous day’s range. If both apply, the next day is a breakout candidate.

What this looks like in the fund today shows in the program statistics. As of June 2022, 23% of positions were closed on the same day and the remaining 77% within a month. Nothing was held longer. By style, 55% was momentum, 21% counter trend, 13% trend following and 11% other.

Trading frequency is high: about 11,900 round turns per year per million dollars. No human handles that volume by hand. The share of discretionary decisions is zero, the program decides alone. Crabel names a one-day average holding period for Multi-Product.

The firm stated its philosophy in a few sentences that explain the numbers above. On its website in 2013 it wrote that strategies should capture “enduring and explainable market participant behavior”. It added that risk is best controlled by “taking a large number of small trades” instead of a few large bets. Diversification across strategy types, regions, sectors and markets was the third pillar.

What can we learn from one of the best traders in the world?

The first lesson is in the risk figure, not in the return figure. Over more than 28 years Crabel kept pace with the stock market’s price gains although his deepest month-end setback was only 16.26%. The edge did not come from big wins but from missing big losses.

That only works if the risk per position stays very small. According to IASG, Crabel’s margin to equity ratio is about 15%, spread across a very large number of small positions. That is the opposite of how most private traders start. Our guide to position sizing shows how to keep each trade small.

The second lesson is less comfortable and just as visible in his numbers. A system that worked well for ten years can run weakly for the next ten years. Crabel’s return over the last decade is 27.92%, about 2.5% per year.

Anyone who expects an approach to work forever once it is found will be disappointed. Even a firm with about 60 specialists and its own research department goes through long dry spells. A realistic expectation for your own trading is therefore lower than most beginners assume.

The third lesson concerns the method, not the result. Crabel counted patterns instead of claiming them, years before computing power became cheap. This testing attitude is the part of his work that transfers best, and the one most often missing in day trading. Our guide to backtesting shows how to start.

Pros and cons of Crabel’s approach

The following comparison rests on the numbers in this article. Every point goes back to a documented value, not to an impression.

Advantages of Crabel’s approach

• Verifiable: every monthly return since March 1998 is public. Among famous traders that is the exception.
• Low risk: the deepest month-end decline is 16.26%. The S&P 500 fell about 46% and 53% in the same period.
• Independent of stocks: the correlation is 0.07. As a portfolio component, that smooths the swings.
• Rules instead of gut feeling: the share of discretionary decisions is zero. That removes emotions as a source of error.
• Long record: more than 28 years of history, starting with ten winning years in a row.

Disadvantages of Crabel’s approach

• Weak decade: only 27.92% in ten years, while the S&P 500 price index gained 254.05%.
• Long dry spells: after the April 2013 peak it took 34 months to reach a new high.
• Behind with dividends: over the full period the S&P 500 with dividends returned 9.18% a year against 7.44%.
• Hard to access: the minimum is $1 million, plus QEP eligibility under US rules.
• Impossible to copy: 11,900 round turns a year per million dollars need your own trading infrastructure.
• Shrinking firm: assets fell from $8.7 billion to $5.0 billion, staff from about 100 to about 60.

Conclusion: what really remains of Toby Crabel

Toby Crabel is one of the few famous traders whose numbers you can recalculate, and they hold up. 673.02% from March 1998 with a deepest month-end decline of 16.26% is an unusual ratio of return to risk. The claim that he beat the stock market needs a footnote, though: only the price index, not the index with dividends.

At the same time, it would be wrong to extend the picture of 2007 into the future. The last ten years were weak, 2025 was the worst year of the series, and both assets and staff have declined. Both sides belong together if you write about him honestly.

For me he is still a trader who convinces, but for a different reason than before. Not because of a high return, but because for almost three decades he stayed disciplined and small. That is exactly the quality where most private traders fail.

The original sources are listed here. All figures in this article come from the firm, the IASG database or from my own calculation based on them.

• Crabel Capital Management: Who We Are
• IASG: Crabel Multi-Product 1x
• Thom Hartle, “Opening shots”, Active Trader, April 2003 (archived PDF)

Frequently asked questions about Toby Crabel

How much money does Crabel Capital Management manage?

Crabel Capital Management states $5.0 billion on its website, as of February 1, 2026. As of September 30, 2022 it was $8.7 billion. The figure means leverage adjusted assets including notional equity, not the capital paid in.

What is Toby Crabel’s net worth?

There is no reliable public figure. Crabel Capital is a privately held firm and publishes neither ownership stakes nor payouts. Circulating estimates rest on no verifiable source, so we do not name a number.

How much does Toby Crabel’s book cost?

The book has long been out of print and is only available used. On October 9, 2026, AbeBooks.com listed two copies at $795 and $1,800 (signed). There is no new edition.

Is Toby Crabel’s book available as a PDF?

Scans circulate online, but they are protected by copyright. We do not link to them. The core idea of the book, the opening range breakout after a narrow range day, is described freely in this article.

What is the ID/NR4 setup by Toby Crabel?

ID/NR4 combines two conditions on one trading day. The day is an inside day, with its high and low inside the previous day’s range, and its range is the narrowest of the last four days. If both apply, the next day is a candidate for a breakout.

Can I invest with Crabel Capital Management?

As a small private investor, usually not. The minimum for the main program is $1 million, and investors must qualify as Qualified Eligible Persons under US rules. Two programs have existed as European UCITS funds since October 2017, which lowers the barrier but does not replace advice.

Is Toby Crabel still active?

Yes, but in a different role. He is Chairman and Chief Investment Officer and leads the firm’s research. Michael Pomada has run the business as President and CEO since July 2016.