Well it’s important to remind yourself what actually causes support and resistance levels. If we rally up on some random news release and happen to push to new highs, then price falls back down, that could very well have just been all of the buying interest fizzing out with no followthrough.
So now on your chart you see a resistance level, but it just happened to be an arbitrary point it time that describes some of the price action of the area. The only significance it has now is that it was a new high for the session (which might then be somehow used by people as a place to enter or exit or whatnot).
Otherwise, the real, true resistance and support come in the form of large orders at that area. So for a solid resistance level, it’s from a very large-sized offer (limit sell) at that spot. Sometimes from a big hedge fund, maybe a sovereign fund, or even real money (like pension funds, mutual funds).
When price gets to that order, it sets off the massive selling which knocks price back down. So the whole time that the order was resting there, it was ready to become resistance once price hit it. Which I think is the kind of thing you’re talking about here - wanting to know if price will actually hit a wall when it gets to that level.
Now unfortunately, we can’t know about every single order and be 100% sure about them, but there are some services that try to report that sort of info when it comes out like Talking-Forex - First for FX News - First for FX News, RANsquawk - Real-time Analysis & News Ltd, and Order Flow Trading > News
Those types of services usually cover other stuff like news releases and things you might not care about, but they do also tend to report orders when they come up. Looking over from stuff from today, it’s been a light session but there was note of some offers from an asian central bank in EUR/USD near 1.3410 (reference) so if EUR/USD gets that high we can probably expect some good resistance up there because there will be a good amount of selling.
The other general approach is to just simply wait until price nears a support/resistance level and watch to see how price reacts. Many traders take a sort of ‘if -> then’ approach depending on the reaction. So if the support/resistance is easily blown through, then we probably have good momentum and the s/r level wasn’t very good…so look for a breakout. If price hits that area and slows down, stalls out, and can’t get any higher, then there is probably a good s/r level there and the momentum can’t get through it.
Alas, you can still be faked out doing that, but nothing in this crazy game is 100% ![:slight_smile: :slight_smile:](https://forums.babypips.com/images/emoji/twitter/slight_smile.png?v=9)