Support & resistance
5 min read · Educational content, not financial advice
Support is a price level where buying pressure has historically been strong enough to stop or reverse a decline. Resistance is the opposite — a level where selling pressure has capped advances. These levels form because traders collectively remember where price reacted before, and place orders around those memories.
Support and resistance aren't exact lines so much as zones — price often reacts a little before or after the precise historical level. Many traders watch how price behaves at these zones (does it reject sharply, or grind through?) as a read on underlying strength.
A broken resistance level often becomes new support, and vice versa — a concept sometimes called 'role reversal.' This is one of the most widely used, broker-agnostic tools in technical analysis, and it underpins many other concepts, including the support/resistance readings on our Market Analysis charts.