Retest

A retest is price returning to a level it has already crossed and trading around it again — the underside of a boundary that was broken, the top edge of a range it has left, a price a previous move made notable. The term describes the geometry of price coming back to a reference point; it says nothing on its own about what happens after it arrives. Whether a retest has occurred at all is a matter of how the level was drawn. A level marked as a single price will rarely be touched exactly, so in practice readers treat a zone of some width as the level, and the width is chosen by the person drawing it. Two charts of the same instrument can therefore show a retest and no retest at the same time. The word is most often used just after a breakout, to describe price revisiting the boundary it crossed rather than continuing away from it, which is also where the ambiguity matters most.