Placing Support Resistance

Placing Support Resistance

Placing support and resistance lines is an art not a science. It will never be a science as long as humans are trading. Support and resistance lines are one of the most basic aspects to trading.
Every trader uses them in one way or another. Each currency pair has highs and lows to which traders pay attention. As you develop your skill at placing S/R lines, you will need to be able to spot the price lines that would be most common to most traders. This is only done by practice and actively trading. Below is a basic outline of how I pick out my S+R lines. Keep in mind that there is a consistency to S+R lines; therefore, you do not have to pick them every week.
There first thing I do when placing S+R lines on a bare chart is identify recent areas of support and resistance.


This is a very simple process. You just place a line at points at which the price has recently shown support and resistance. Typically you would look for three or more bounces from the same line. An ideal scenario would have the wick of the candle hitting the line, though; it is acceptable to use the candle’s body to place a line even if the wick has moved beyond the line. Even though the candle body is significant you cannot place a line based solely off of candle body bounces. The primary focus should be on the wick.


The next step is to scroll back through your charts and confirm the lines you have placed. Are they historically significant? By historically significant I simply mean that over the past few years has the price bounced away exactly from or near that line? You should be able to see a few bounces just about every time the price is in the area of that line. I usually go back about five years. You do not want to pick too many lines. You are only looking for the strongest ones. GBP/JPY lines should be a minimum of 100 pips apart. You do not need a line every 100 pips. Place lines only where you find them. In certain areas on my GBP/JPY chart I have about 250 pips between lines, so do not be afraid of large distances between lines. If you start placing weak lines to fill in gaps you will likely start taking bad trades based on those lines. Remember, you want lines that the most traders will observing as valid S/R lines.

There isn’t much more to say about the process of placing lines. It may seem like a daunting task at first, but with practice you will find that it is extremely easy. If you need reassurance, post your lines in the forum and ask more experienced traders to give you some guidance.

Line Migration

You should also be aware that lines tend to migrate slightly over the course of a few months. They will move 30 pips up, then 30 pips down, so be ready to tweak your lines as time passes. Line migration occurs because occasionally a candle breaks past a line and then reverses, leaving a small wick 10-30 pips beyond the line. The next time the price reaches that level it bounces away from the new high formed by that wick. After a few bounces you will find that the price is more likely to bounce from the new level as opposed to the original S+R line. All you need to do is move your line to the new level, and use that new level as the S+R level.

How long do they last?

The same S+R lines have been around for decades. After you place them on a chart and get them right, all you need to do is adjust them to account for line migration. Other than that, your S+R lines should always remain pretty much at the same levels. Sometimes an S+R zone forms on a line.

(I’ll explain S+R zones in the next section). When that S+R zone eventually becomes obsolete, it can form a new line and eliminate the original one. This however is rare, and when it does happen it is unlikely the original S+R will move more than 50 pips.