When a price floor breaks, does the price really keep dropping?

A "support level" is just a price where the market has stopped falling before — a floor. The folklore says that once that floor cracks, sellers pile in and price tumbles to the next floor down. It sounds obvious. It is almost always wrong.

How we tested it

We took six years of Nasdaq-100 futures — the same market, minute by minute — and found every clean break of a 4-hour support floor. Not a handful of cherry-picked charts: 451 of them. Then we asked one simple question about each. After the floor broke, did price actually reach the next floor down before doing anything else?

Across all six years, it worked 15.5% of the time and simply failed 83.6% of the time. Look at the bars: every single year lands under 20%. The best year barely cleared 18%. The worst — 2024 — came in at 6%. There is no year where the crowd’s reflex was right.

In six years, a broken floor reached the next floor down fewer than 1 time in 6.

What it means — and what it doesn’t

This does not mean "always bet against a break." It means the automatic story — floor breaks, therefore down — is not what the tape does. Most of the time the break is where the move ends, not where it begins. That is the single most useful thing to un-learn on this whole page.