How do you confirm breakout or false out on trend line?


The Chart is USDCAD 4H, you see the first breaking is very bullish, but it ends up a bull trap, how do you confirm if it’s a real breakout or false out? I should ask, what’s your method of “confirmation signal” to make you pull to trigger?

You’re focusing on the entry signal, and the pattern that immediately generates it, say just 1 or 2 bars in your chosen time-frame.

Whatever time-frame you use, I think you might find your entries will be more reliable and price action afterwards will more often follow your conclusions if you focus on the set-up, i.e. in a downtrend be short, in an uptrend be long.

In my opinion, although I do not trade breakouts (for the exact reason you have identified), is that you can not confirm with 100% accuracy if a breakout is the ‘real deal’. Just like any approach to trading, not one single trader can achieve 100% correctness - in most instances far from it. This however has limited effect on the profitability of a particular trading method. You can be wrong more times than you are correct and still remain profitable.

What does matter though from your prospective is the parameters you are using to identify a potential breakout, and the success rate of this approach when tested over many many individual trades. From here you can start to build a picture and work on probabilities of a breakout being the ‘real deal’

The common solution to this issue is waiting for ‘extra’ confirmation, however the more you allow price to breakout of an established trend the more your potential returns may diminish. A sensible ‘middle ground’ would be to wait for the extra confirmation of the breakout, and trade off a potential area where support becomes resistance or resistance becomes support. This way you would, in hindsight, get the best of both worlds.

I would normally rely on something other than just a trendline to define the underlying trend. A trend line is mainly a kind of approximate definition of the likely external limits of the price movements within the trend and are not necessarily always very precise, and of course, sudden spikes resulting from, say ,a news event or statement can easily break a TL and then quickly revert back into the underlying direction.

I do not trade the USDCAD, but I applied my normal chart template to your example and the green band there shows that the trend had actually, as least temporarily, (re)turned negative. Therefore, I would have interpreted this spike as a sell opportunity once it bounced off the S/R region that I have highlighted in blue dot-dashes and probably entered on the close back below the green band at the point arrowed.

The other consideration is to always keep an eye on the longer TF, in this case maybe the daily. If you look at the chart below then there is clearly a bigger picture of a downtrend within which this 4H upside breakout is only a minor upwards spike within the longer term trendline.

But, hey, these are MAs and therefore indicators, which are considered as trash on this site so don’t take this seriously! :slight_smile: Afterall, indicators are “lagging” and if you want to check what is the current trend (i.e. where we are now compared with where we were before) what possible use could a lagging indicator be! :smiley:



There isn’t a way to do that with certainty: it’s only ever a [I][U]probability[/U][/I]-function.

Confirmation from higher time-frames, as Manxx mentions above, is a way of increasing the probability by taking trades only in the same direction as the longer-term trend.

I trade many breakouts, but only breakouts of [U]horizontal[/U] trendlines, which (because they directly reflect support and/or resistance) I trust [B]far[/B] more than breakouts of diagonal ones.

This is very true and there are perhaps reason for this.

The diagonal “trendlines” are only markers that technical analysts draw on their charts and dont have any underlying commercial meaning. They “work” mainly because there are a significant number of technical traders drawing the same lines - in other words, traders are sharpening the focus on what would otherwise be a fudgy kind of region into a thin line.

ON the other hand horizontal lines can also demonstrate a certain price region which is significant because it generates underlying activity. For example, a wholesale importer of electronic goods knows what domestic end-consumer price levels he needs in order to sell his imports. Therefore he knows at what exchange rate level he can buy in goods, add on his profit margin, and offer for sale at competitive prices. Therefore every time the exchange rate reaches a certain level it generates trade.

Another example might be the huge investment and pension funds who are placing investments in other currencies and constantly adjusting their portfolio profiles, They will not do everything in one trade, rather, whenever the rate reaches what they consider to be a favourable level then they move another segment of funds. This again reflects on a certain price region.

There are surely many commercial and investment forces impacting on transactions in the real foreign exchange world where actual money is moving. And it is the chartists who sharpen these up into lines.

Naturally, these levels do not last forever and changing fundamental inputs will move these parameters accordingly.

These are just some simple examples in what is otherwise an intensely varied and complex market! :slight_smile: