Forex Stop Hunting

If there is much market demand to buy above a resistance level or sell below the support, the forex broker acting as the market maker has to absorb all the buy/sell orders. However, you must know that the market maker is not a fool. There must be a seller for each buyer and a buyer for each seller.

Most of the retail traders being new or inexperienced individual investor like to trade the breakouts! The new traders learn technical analysis. They tend to most eagerly follow trade recommendations based on certain chart patterns recommended in the technical analysis courses.

Most of the successful traders are contrarian in their trading approach. The seasoned traders do exactly the opposite of what the crowd is expected to do. They prefer to fade breakouts.

Trading is a zero sum game. For every loser, there is a winner. Most of the breakouts fail. Breakouts fail because the institutional or the seasoned traders take advantage of the crowd psychology of the retail or inexperienced traders and win at their expense.

Understand the tricks that can be played by the forex dealers and seasoned traders. Market makers, mostly the forex dealers and brokers can fade breakouts. Their game plan is simple. They will make money from the majority of the crowd. The crowd thinks that prices will rally happily after an upside breakout. Similarly, the crowd thinks that it will decline dangerously after a downside breakout.

Whether you like it or not, market makers have to take the opposite side of your trade. They are the pricing counterparties to the retail traders like you and me. Suppose most of the retail traders have placed their stop entry orders at a certain price above the resistance level anticipating a breakout.

Market makers spend some of their money to bid up the price to that level where most of the stop entry levels have been placed. Market makers reach into their pockets. Now they can sell to most of the traders who are desperate to buy. They make some decent profits from this trick that they had played on inexperienced traders.

By selling to the retail crowd, market makers get the chance to close their long positions. Now they begin to overwhelm the buying crowd by going short. This pushes the prices down, below the breakout level. Many stop loss orders have been placed by the retail traders who wanted to trade the upside breakout at this price level.

Market makers have the information of their customer’s orders from their order book. Thus a potential conflict of interest exists. By buying from the retail traders who are selling to close their losing breakout trades, market makers happily offload their short positions now. Retail traders must know how to protect themselves.

Retail crowd thinks that the false breakout is due to the sudden turning of the market. Market makers often go on the stop hunting spree. False breakouts maybe the consequence of that! These false breakouts are most likely the direct result of the games market makers play.