I have used scanz.com for years (formerly known as equityfeed). As with any scanner you will have to define what a "breakout" is for your purposes. I have found it to be highly effective when used to scan a watchlist that I myself have selected.
I have scans running that tell me which are breaking out and which have pulled back to support. It also has a breakout scanner that I run all day long. I typically set it just to tell me which stocks on my list are hitting new high of day and those hitting new low of day. But I do run it for 52 week high breakouts down to 20 day high breakouts.
Again, you will get the best bang for the buck if you construct the watch list and then point the program to scan
your watch list.
For example here is the result of one of my scans when scanning the entire market rather than my own watchlists:
View attachment 245838
Pointing at the general market, it found
760 stocks meeting my criteria, and many of them junk names. Not the scanner's fault by any means, and I could tighten up the criteria and weed out much of the garbage. But I do not need to tighten the criteria because I assemble my own watchlists, which "pre-sorts" the market for me (and for scanz).
Here is the result when run against my list of about 50 stocks I follow daily:
View attachment 245840
In this scan it came up with 12 candidates. Today I traded TSLA, LAZR, NFLX, and SPOT.
I also keep a list of around 200 other tickers that are not quite ready for prime time, and once one does start acting frisky, I move it to the main list. Meanwhile stocks from the main list that become broken are moved to a smaller list for potential shorts or, at the very least, for rehab, e.g. a stock that is down on earnings is usually not worth trading for 4 to 8 weeks, so I take it off the daily scanner and put it in rehab, e.g. Zoom (ZM) is one such ticker recently moved form the daily trader to the rehab/short candidate list. I am currently short ZM.
I do pretty well, trading both the underlying and options (straight vanilla mostly long calls but sometimes long puts). Scanz is a big part of my ability to catch plays when it is most advantageous to do so. But whichever scanner you choose, you will want to make sure you can point it to scan a watchlist of your own making. It is work in the beginning but once you get your initial watchlist and define your bread and butter scans, it is so easy even a caveman can do it.
