Breaker Block
An order block that failed and had its polarity flipped after a structure break.
A breaker block is an order block that failed to hold: price traded through it and broke structure the other way (BOS or CHoCH). Once broken, that former order block "switches sides" and becomes a zone of interest in the opposite direction.
Example: a bullish order block that fails and gets traded through to the downside becomes a bearish breaker block — a zone where you’d now look for sells on a pullback, instead of buys.
This concept illustrates a core ICT idea: a price zone doesn’t have a fixed value — its polarity depends on what the market has done with it since, here a failure that becomes a new signal.
How to spot one: look for an order block that failed. Concretely, in an uptrend, a last higher low forms, price breaks it to the downside (CHoCH), then rallies back. The bullish order block that did not hold becomes, once price returns to it from below, a bearish breaker. The zone that was meant to support now acts as resistance.
This is the ICT concept closest to a classical idea: polarity, where broken support becomes resistance. The difference lies in the precision of the zone — a breaker is bounded by an identifiable candle, not by an approximate hand-drawn line.
Why it works: the buyers who entered on the original order block are now underwater. When price returns to their entry level, many close out to limit the damage — which adds selling pressure exactly where the zone sits.
How to trade it? You wait for price to come back into the breaker zone and enter in the direction of the new structure, stop beyond the zone. The setup is especially reliable when the breaker coincides with a fair value gap left by the breaking move.
The classic mistake: identifying a breaker without a prior structure break. Without a validated CHoCH, the zone remains an ordinary order block in its original direction. The breaker only exists because structure changed.
Second trap: confusing it with a mitigation block. Both involve a zone retested after a contrary move, but a breaker implies the zone was decisively broken and its role inverted, whereas a mitigation block keeps its original role.