Breaker Block
An order block that price closed through after mitigating it — the zone flips polarity, and former support is treated as resistance.
Also called: breaker · failed order block · flipped order block
What it means
A breaker starts as an ordinary order block. Price returns to it, mitigates it, and then closes beyond it instead of reversing from it. That failure is the information: the zone that was supposed to hold did not, and the traders who positioned there are now underwater and are expected to exit if price returns.
The direction label flips with the failure. A bullish order block that fails becomes a bearish breaker block, and vice versa — which is a common source of confusion when reading tools that do not state which convention they use.
The sequence is strict: mitigation must happen first. A zone price has never traded back into cannot be a breaker, however decisively price later moves through it.
How OptionLab Pro’s engine uses it
In the live engine
Our detector requires prior mitigation to be true before the breaker check runs at all — without that ordering a never-touched block that price gapped through would be labelled a breaker, which is a different and much weaker event. On emission the direction label is inverted, so a failing bull OB is reported as "Bearish Breaker Block".
go/internal/engine/smc/detect_extra.go (detectAllOrderBlocks, breaker gating)The common mistake
Where traders get this wrong
Labelling a block a breaker the moment price closes beyond it, skipping the mitigation requirement. The second mistake is keeping the original direction label after the flip — a bullish OB that fails is bearish evidence, and carrying the old label forward inverts the read.
Go deeper
There is a full lesson on this in the Academy, with an interactive widget and a Hindi translation.
Related terms
Educational and analytical content only. OptionLab Pro is not a SEBI-registered investment adviser or research analyst and does not give buy or sell recommendations. Derivatives trading carries a high risk of loss.