Breakout and Retest Scanner Indicator for MT4 FREE Download

The Breakout and Retest Scanner is a MT4 indicator that looks for one setup. Price breaks through a support or resistance level, comes back to test it from the other side, then moves away again. The indicator scans up to 50 symbols on six timeframes from a single chart, draws every setup it finds with an entry, a stop loss and Fibonacci take-profit levels, and can send alerts to your phone. It is a free download on this page.

What Is a Breakout and Retest?

A breakout and retest is a support and resistance setup in three moves. Price breaks through a level, returns to it, then leaves it again in the breakout direction. The return trip is the retest. If old resistance now holds as support (or old support as resistance), the break is treated as real rather than a false breakout.

potting this by hand means watching a lot of charts and waiting, which is the job the scanner takes over. For the manual method, entry rules and risk math, see our guide on how to trade breakout and retest setups. The same idea applied to sloping levels is covered in the trendline retest strategy.

How the Breakout and Retest Scanner Marks a Setup

Every setup is drawn the same way:

• Level zone – The broken support or resistance, drawn as a red block for a short and a blue block for a long. The darker overlap shows where the retest pushed back into it.
• Zigzag – Three lines tracing the swing before the break, the breakout leg and the retest leg.
• Stop loss – The violet box above a short or below a long, with its price labelled.
• Targets – The green box. TP3 and TP4 sit at the 161.8% and 323.6% Fibonacci levels by default. TP1 and TP2 (38.2% and 61.8%) exist only in the Pattern method and are switched off.
• Entry – An arrow and a blue price label where the indicator treats the setup as triggered.
• Scan panel – Purple timeframe buttons are included in the scan. The Scan button turns scanning of every Market Watch symbol on and off, and the status line above the panel shows which state it is in.

The Method input decides when that entry arrow prints. Breakout, the default, waits for price to leave the retest and confirm the move. Pattern marks the entry as soon as the retest touches the level. Both use the same zone, stop and targets, so the only difference is how far price has already travelled when you are told about it. That difference turned out to be large.

If you only want breakout zones and test or retest markers on one chart, without a scanner or trade levels, the Auto Breakouts and Retests Indicator does that on MT4 and MT5.

The scanner works on any symbol in your Market Watch, so forex pairs, metals, indices and crypto CFDs are all fair game, from M5 up to D1. As with any signal tool, practise on an MT4 demo account until you know how its alerts behave before trading them live.

Settings and Customization

The download includes the indicator file and a general MT4 install guide, but no manual for the indicator itself. The table below covers every input that changes what it finds or how it alerts.

The rest are display options: level labels, colours, arrow size, and a chart theme input set to White that should match your chart background.

Changes we would make. Several of them answer the issues traders raise most often when running the scanner day to day:

• Pick the method on purpose – The most common complaint from users is that the arrow arrives after the move has started, which is the Breakout method’s behaviour in our captures. Pattern gets you the retest price along with more failed setups, Breakout gets you confirmation and a later entry. One long-time user scans with Pattern only.
• Turn alerts on – Set Display Alert or Push Notification to true. Push also needs your MetaQuotes ID under Tools, Options, Notifications in MT4.
• Turn on Levels detail in signal – The alert then carries the entry, stop and targets, so you can judge a setup before opening the chart.
• Keep Age Pattern at 0 or 1 – Users report alerts for setups they could not find on the chart, or that were many candles old by the time they looked. Higher values alert on setups that formed several candles earlier, so keep this low.
• Favour H1 and above – Regular users say it works best from H1 up, which matches the cleaner H1 setups in our test. Remove M5 and M15 from Auto scan Period if you want fewer, cleaner alerts.
• Trim the scan if MT4 slows down – One user reported MT4 slowing down with the full scan running. 50 symbols on six timeframes is 300 combinations every 15 minutes, so lower Max Symbols or drop timeframes you do not trade.
• Test on your own broker first – One trader saw noticeably more false alerts on one broker’s price feed than on another’s. Run it on your broker’s demo before trusting the alerts.

What We Saw on EURUSD: Breakout vs Pattern Method

We loaded the indicator on EURUSD with default inputs, changed only the Method, and compared the two on H1 (late August to mid-September) and M5 (29 September to 1 October).

On the setups both methods drew, the zone, stop and targets were identical. Only the entry moved:

On H1 the Breakout method printed its arrow a day or more after the retest. By then price had already passed TP3 on both shorts, which left a stop more than twice as far away and only TP4 as a target. On the first short, the Pattern entry reached TP3 within a day. The Breakout entry, 39 pips lower, never reached TP4, and price came back through the stop on 9 September.

On M5 the gap is smaller but points the same way: 10 pips later on the long and 6 pips later on the short.

The Pattern method also draws more. Across the shared H1 window it marked five setups against two for Breakout, and three of the five were setups the Breakout method never confirmed. Two of those reached TP3. The third, a long on 9 September with a stop about 5 pips away, was stopped out the same day. That is the trade-off: Pattern gets you in at the level and shows you more, including setups that fail quickly. Breakout shows fewer and shows them late.

Eight setups on one pair is a sample, not a statistic, and none of these figures include spread.

How to Use It

• Step 1: Load the symbols – Add the pairs you want scanned to Market Watch. The scanner reads that list, so the indicator only needs to sit on one chart.
• Step 2: Set alerts and method – Switch on the alerts you want and choose Breakout or Pattern.
• Step 3: Open the alerted chart – When an alert arrives, open that symbol and timeframe and check the drawing: the level, the retest, and where the entry sits against TP3.
• Step 4: Check the room left – If the entry is already past TP3, which happened with the Breakout method on H1, the stop is far away and only TP4 is left. Decide whether the remaining reward still covers the risk.
• Step 5: Size from the stop – The stop distance changes with every setup, so a fixed lot means a different risk each time. Size it with our Lot Size Optimizer.

As a standalone indicator, its effectiveness often depends on how it’s combined with other tools or strategies. A higher-timeframe trend check, either the built-in MA filter or a separate tool such as Trend Radar, keeps you from trading retests against the bigger move. If you hold for TP4, a Fibonacci based trailing stop is one way to lock in part of the move on the way.

Traders who would rather automate breakout trading can compare the Session Range Breakout EA, a robot that trades range breaks on five markets.

Breakout and Retest Scanner

An MT4 indicator that scans up to 50 symbols on six timeframes for breakout and retest setups and draws each one with an entry, a stop loss and Fibonacci take-profit levels, with optional pop-up, push and email alerts.

Multi-Symbol, Multi-Timeframe Scanner

★★★★☆

Drawn Entry, Stop Loss and Fibonacci Targets

★★★★☆☆

Signal Timing (Breakout vs Pattern Method)

★★★☆☆☆

Pros

• Scans up to 50 Market Watch symbols on M5 to D1 from one chart
• Entry, stop loss, TP3 and TP4 drawn for every setup
• Pattern method enters at the retest with a tight stop
• Pop-up, push and email alerts, with prices in the alert text if enabled

Cons

• Default Breakout entries come late, and on both H1 shorts we checked TP3 was already passed
• All alert channels ship switched off
• Pattern method also draws setups the Breakout method filters out, some of which fail fast

Summary

3.3

★★★★☆☆

The scanner does the slow part of this strategy, which is checking dozens of charts for the same structure, and every setup arrives with its levels already drawn. The Method input matters more than anything else in the settings. The default Breakout method waits for confirmation and enters well after the retest, while the Pattern method enters at the retest with the same stop and the same targets. Alerts are off by default.

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Last tested by @Silent in Oct 2026 for ForexCracked Editorial.

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How It Compares

The scanner is the only one of the three that hands you a complete trade plan and watches more than one chart. The other two are lighter chart tools that leave entries and stops to you.

Frequently Asked Questions

Conclusion

The Breakout and Retest Scanner takes over the slow part of this strategy: checking dozens of charts for the same three-move structure and drawing the levels when it appears. The drawings are clear, and every setup arrives with its entry, stop and targets already marked.

However, results depend mostly on one input. With the default Breakout method, H1 entries came late enough that TP3 was already behind them. With the Pattern method, the same setups were entered at the retest with the same stop, along with extra setups that sometimes failed fast. Treat each alert as a candidate to check, not a trade to copy, and switch the alerts on before relying on it.