Breaker BlockICT

Take the bullish case. Price makes a low, rallies to a swing high, then drops to a lower low, taking the sell stops that sat under the first low. That is the liquidity sweep. Then it reverses hard and closes above the swing high: a break of market structure to the upside.

Look back at the swing high. The last up-close candle there is the bearish order block that launched the drop to the lower low. It was supposed to hold price down on the way back. It did not: price closed straight through it. That failed order block is now the bullish breaker, and on the next retracement it is expected to act as support.

The bearish breaker is the mirror image: a high, a swing low, a higher high that takes the buy stops above the first high, then a close below the swing low. The last down-close candle at that swing low becomes resistance.

Mark the last opposing candle at the swing that was broken. If several same-direction candles sit together at the turn, many traders take the whole cluster. The zone runs from that candle's high to its low. Some traders use the body only. Either works, as long as you pick one and never switch to whichever fits the trade.

Draw the mean threshold, the 50% line of the zone, as well. A retracement that closes beyond it is the usual sign the breaker is not holding. And mark the breaker on the timeframe you execute on, with the direction taken from a higher one. A 5-minute bullish breaker against a 4-hour move lower is a countertrend trade, whatever it is called.

All three are the same kind of candle, the last opposing one at a swing. What differs is what happened next. An order block held: price left it and has not closed back through it. A breaker block failed after a liquidity sweep: the swing beyond it made a new extreme first, then structure broke through the block. A mitigation block failed without a sweep: the second swing fell short (a higher low in the bullish case), then structure broke through the block.

The distinction matters because the sweep is the whole argument for a breaker. Taking the stops beyond the first low is the fuel for the reversal, and it is why ICT teaching ranks a breaker above a mitigation block. If you cannot point to the swept level, you are looking at a mitigation block, or at nothing.

The standard entry is the first retracement into the zone after the structure break, in the direction of the break. The stop goes beyond the far side of the breaker, or more conservatively beyond the swept extreme. The target is the next pool of liquidity on the other side: the old highs above a bullish breaker, the old lows below a bearish one.

Two filters carry most of the weight. Timing: breakers that form inside a kill zone have the participation behind them that the sweep needs. Location: a bullish breaker in discount, below the midpoint of the dealing range, is buying where ICT says to buy. When the breaker also overlaps a fair value gap pointing the same way, that combination is what ICT calls the Unicorn.

The four-step definition is strict enough to test, which is rare for this vocabulary. Write it down as rules someone else could follow, pick one market and one timeframe, and log every breaker that forms over a set period, including the ones where price closed straight back through the zone. Skipping the failures is how every concept ends up looking like it works.

Log three things per breaker: whether price came back to the zone at all, whether it held the mean threshold, and whether it reached the opposing liquidity before the stop. Thirty examples tell you very little. The sample size calculator shows how many you need before a win rate means anything. On CRTLAB the order block backtester draws blocks as price prints them and re-marks any block that price closes through as a breaker. You apply the sweep rule yourself, so you can compare breakers that had a sweep with the ones that did not. Open NAS100 on the 15-minute with blocks, sweeps and structure.