Happy Friday, sorcerers. Welcome on another educational post by Investroy!
The trading and investing industry is a difficult one to succeed in as it has various complex details that you need to dig into both from technical and psychological perspectives. Predicting the price movement and understanding the logic behind it may be challenging at first. But as time passes and you gain experience, you understand the science behind price action and make more logical decisions.
Today, we will talk about a rather puzzling issue faced by many beginning and experienced traders: the theme of differentiating fake price movements from real ones. Although, it is not always possible to separate the two to the full extent, it is feasible to build a plan around it and stick to it on a consistent basis.
A fake-out is a failed attempt of the price to break above/below a key zone. Very often, it is associated with liquidity grabs and Stop Loss hunts. To demonstrate, looking at the illustration pictured on the chart, you can see how the price attempts to continue its bullish moves, but fakes out from the sideways-moving range and re-enters the borders of it instead.
On the contrary, a breakout happens when price successfully penetrates a key level and continues its impulsive moves in the same direction
Now, the question is: how to distinguish a real breakout from a fake one?
Firstly, it has to be kept in mind that what goes up, must come down. In trading terms, after an impulsive move, a correctional one should come; after a breakout, a re-test should happen before continuing impulses. In order to identify whether a breakout is a fake or a real one, we should always look for a re-test of the penetrated zone after a break is completed. However, you have to keep in mind that it is not a 100% fact that a re-test will happen every time. Sometimes, breakouts will be so impulsive that price will not retrace back to re-test a penetrated zone.
Nothing is 100% accurate in trading. Not every breakout will lead to a re-test before impulsive continuations. Not every fake breakout will seem like a fake-out at first. However, waiting for a re-test of a broken zone is a good way to evade fake breakouts and capture high risk-to-reward trades and opportunities.
To conclude, if you want to make sure you don’t get faked out and liquidated, always wait for a re-test of a penetrated level before forming biases and executing positions.