Trading Bollinger band bounces and retests in a ranging market. Just because price is range bound doesn’t mean you have to be without trading opportunities!
Trading an obvious trend is a lot more straightforward than trading when price is range bound, or appearing to move sideways. Many traders actually pass on the possibility of trading at all in a range bound market, standing aside until price once more takes on a definite trend. There are however strategies for coping with this much more restricted range of price movement. This free strategy is offered as one such approach.
The Bolly Band Bounce is based on the observed behaviour of price where the Bollinger bands form a kind of limit for short-term price movement. In this respect Bollinger bands are well named, in that they almost exhibit the elasticity characteristics of rubber bands. Price will approach an outer band, encounter resistance and snap back towards the opposite band.
One way to make use of this behaviour is to trade the bounces at the outer bands. This is not very effective in a sharply trending market, but when the market is in a range it can be very effective indeed for short-term scalps.
The first thing you must do when looking to trade this strategy is to determine that price is indeed in a range. There are many ways to do this but with Bollinger bands I find the simplest is to check if price is staying on one side or the other of the mid-band. If so, and price is making consistently lower lows then price is trending down. And the opposite of course applies for an uptrend: if price is staying above the mid-band and making consistently higher highs then we are in an uptrend.
The following illustration shows price in a down trend at the left of the screen turning into a trending market at the right:
Free Forex Strategy #3: Bollinger Bands Trending Turn to Ranging
