It is no surprise that breakout trading is extremely popular.
If you can master the art of playing profitable breakout trades, then you can often find yourself on the end of explosive quick winning trades.
Whilst learning how to find, enter and manage breakout trades does take practice, it also comes with a lot of benefits once you have them down pat. Breakout trading can be done on many time frames, many different Forex pairs and other markets and with a large or small trading account.
Table of Contents
What is Breakout Trading?
As a breakout trader you are looking for trades that are ‘breaking out’ of a key level, region or important zone.
Whilst the most commonly used form of breakout trading is looking for major support and resistance levels to break, there are many other breakout strategies.
These include the London breakout strategy, looking for range breakouts and looking for a set time frames range to break, for example the high or low of the daily range.
How to Use Breakout Indicators to Find Trades
As traders we don’t want to miss high quality trading opportunities. This can be extremely difficult when we are drawing our important support and resistance levels, adding and watching different indicators and then also looking for different breakout strategies.
Just like the other indicators discussed on the blog that save you time such as the pin bar indicator or the inside bar indicator, using an indicator to help find a potential breakout can ensure you don’t miss any quality trades whilst also saving a lot of time.
Before downloading and using any of the indicators discussed below, make sure you are using stable MT4 or MT5 trading charts from a reputable broker.
London Breakout Indicator
The London trading session is where the bulk of the trading is carried out for each 24 hour period.
With this in mind, it is no surprise that the start of the London session is when a lot of the markets volatility and price movements also begin to increase and create more trading chances.
The following MT4 London Breakout Indicator is a simple indicator that gives clear buy and sell signals depending on which way the price is breaking along with suitable prices.
This is a free indicator and you can get it at; London Breakout Indicator MT4
Support and Resistance Breakout Indicator
Support and resistance levels are the main levels used to trade breakouts.
When a support or resistance level has been proven and is being respected time and again, the eventual breakout can often be large and fast-paced.
Using an indicator to help you find these levels and identify potential breakout zones will shorten your trade detection time and ensure you don’t miss any trades.
Listed below are two simple free indicators for MT4 and MT5. Both of these indicators can be used on higher and smaller time frames such as the daily through to the 15 minute charts to find simple support and resistance breakout trades.
MT5 Support and Resistance Breakout Indicator by EarnForex
Breakout Alert Indicator
As mentioned at the start of the post, as traders we don’t want to miss trading opportunities, especially high quality breakout trades.
The following free indicator is a simple breakout alert indicator that you can use to send you alerts when price is breaking a key level like a support / resistance or trend line. This is a super handy indicator.
Breakout Alert Indicator for MT4 by Forex Strategies Revealed
Using an Opening Range Breakout Scanner
Whilst the indicator above is solid, many traders want to use an opening range breakout scanner.
The expert advisor listed below is a premium EA, but it does offer more options and customization for those wanting a little more.
With this expert advisor you can customize your own break-even, SL, TP and Trailing-Stop. You also have built in money management that is very handy.
Open Range EA by Point Zero Trading
NOTE: Not sure how to download and install indicators? Read our previous lesson that includes download and install instructions here; High and Low Price Action Indicator
Recap
Breakout trading can be very profitable once mastered. Make sure to take into account the trading session you are using your breakout strategy and the time frame you are trading it on.
The markets will move a lot more at certain times compared to others and smaller time frames can be wild and fast-paced, especially for newer traders.
Lastly, make sure you always test any new strategy on good demo charts before ever risking real money.
