Breakouts have often been regarded as retail strategies only because retail traders tend to have a limited understanding of a market so it makes sense that the only way your going to increase your odds with breakouts is to increase your knowledge and understanding of a market. To catch a sustained BO then your talking about early stages of trend reversal, continuation or a completion of a correction. If you can't give a definitive answer to what constitutes any of these examples your going to struggle, or at least one of them (And price structure will hold up trend) Or in other words, what is the context of the current price action? So to catch early stage of trend,which is the initial Break out phase which do tend to break with more energy you need first then to understand what a price reversal actually looks like as there's a few different types to study. Here's just 1 quick example of what I mean, a simple exhaustion setup on a smaller tf.
Breakouts work best with a combination of other factors...trend/fundamentals/support and resistance levels.
Piptaker: That's an interesting insight. Trends start from somewhere, often reversals from previous moves.