Bollinger Bands and Breaks

The (FX) market follows a steady cycle of oscillating between a range bound and trending environment, on a long and short term basis. During range bound markets, the buying and selling forces remain more or less equal, and therefore compress the market into a sideways trading pattern such as the triangle consolidation pattern shown below. Once the market reaches a critical point, either the buyers or sellers overtake the opposing side, and force the market into a new trend; to the upside or downside. However detecting these breakouts can be quite tricky as the market has the tendency to trade to slightly new high or low prices, only to return inside its previous trading range. Therefore we must employ a filter that will hopefully help us avoid these false breakouts, and preserve our trading capital for only those ‘true’ breaks in the range. With that said, we can see as the market eventually broke out of it’s trading range, the break was marked by the first candlestick to close below the lower Bollinger Band as well as below it’s current support level. Once this occurred the market quickly began a new trend to the downside. For this reason, we should always consider the market’s activity more relevant when studying the ‘closing’ prices, and not simply the highs and lows.