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Beginners see two or three highs at the same price and call it a strong resistance zone. Price will respect it, they think. In practice, equal highs are a shopping list. Every trader who shorted that level has a stop just above it, and every breakout trader has a buy order sitting there too. That is a pool of orders, and large participants need counterparties to fill size. So price is often drawn toward those highs, not repelled by them. The cleaner the equal highs look, the more obvious the target. I treat them as a magnet until proven otherwise. What I look for is how price behaves on arrival: slow grind with small candles often precedes a sweep, while a sharp rejection candle at the level, with volume or range expansion, can mean the level held. I never short into equal highs just because they look like a ceiling. I wait to see whether they get taken first. Sometimes the best trade is to do nothing until the obvious level is gone, then look for the reaction.

I agree they act more like a magnet than a wall. The arrival behaviour is what matters. On USDJPY during Tokyo I have seen clean equal highs get taken by a few pips and then reverse within minutes, but on days with a strong trend those same highs became the launch point for the next leg. The higher timeframe direction usually decides which of the two outcomes you get.

This matches what I see on EURUSD during London. Equal highs from the Asian session get taken in the first hour more often than they hold, and I stopped shorting them a long time ago. The one time they've been reliable for me is when they're old, from several days back, and price arrives at them already tired after a long move.

The arrival behaviour is the most useful part of your post. In my journal I note whether price came into the level in small overlapping candles or in one large impulse. The slow grinds swept the level and reversed fairly often, while the sharp impulses tended to break through and keep going. Writing that down for a couple of months gave me a clearer picture than any rule I'd read.

I've also started waiting for the sweep to happen and then looking for a lower timeframe shift back below the old highs before considering a short. It means I miss the very top, but the entries are far more reliable. If the sweep never comes, I simply don't trade that level and look elsewhere.