Retest

What it means

After a zone breaks, price often comes back to it. A retest is that return when the zone holds in its new role — a broken resistance that price dips into and closes back above has acted as support.

The interesting part is the role change. The same band that stopped an advance is now the thing an advance rests on, and a chart that does this is telling a more complete story than one that never came back.

How we detect it

The engine records a retest when three things are true on consecutive bars: the previous bar closed above the top of a resistance zone, the current bar's low reached back down into that top edge, and the current bar still closed above it. The note it writes is a pullback into the broken zone that held on a closing basis.

This is deliberately narrow. The touch has to be real — the bar's low must actually reach the band — and the close has to be on the far side, so a bar that fell back inside for good is not a retest.

The engine looks for this on BROKEN RESISTANCE only. A support zone that breaks and is retested from below is not detected today. That is a real gap, and it is written here rather than left for a reader to discover from a silence.

When the read carries information

• The original break was a clean one, so the zone that price returns to is the zone that mattered.
• The return happens within the twelve bars the engine scans; an older retest is outside the window.
• The timeframe is one where a pullback takes at least one full bar — on very fast timeframes the whole move can occur inside a single candle and leave nothing to compare.

When it misleads

• Price returns to the zone and keeps going. That is not a retest and the engine records nothing, which can read as silence when something did happen.
• The pullback happens on the downside of a broken support, which this engine does not currently detect at all.
• A very wide bar can satisfy all three conditions in one move that had no pause in it, because the test is built from a bar's low and close rather than from its path.

How it reaches you

In an answer, a retest is reported with its timestamp and the zone it belongs to. It is an observation that a zone has so far behaved in its new role.

So far is the whole of the claim. Nothing about a retest states that the zone will keep holding, and nothing about it is a suggestion to a reader.