By James Woolley – Trading breakouts is undoubtedly one of the most effective ways of trading the currency markets. It works because the masses will often act upon these breakouts, and therefore as a result each breakout will often move even further in the required direction. So how you can successfully trade these breakouts yourself?
Well you can start by just looking at price patterns of the major currency pairs. Although they will often fluctuate all over the place, at some point the price will enter a quiet spell and start trading in a very narrow range. This is the time to pay attention because you want to jump on board as soon as there is a meaningful breakout. You will generally find that the longer the price is confined in a tight trading range, the more reliable the breakout will be.
If you find that you are comfortable just trading the price, you could use one or two technical indicators to help you identify these potential breakout situations. The first one I want to discuss is the Bollinger Band indicator.
The best way to use Bollinger Bands is to wait until the two outer lines become very narrow because this tells you that the price is currently entering a quiet period, and is therefore likely to break upwards or downwards in the near future. When the price moves through either the upper or lower line, you can then think about trading in the same direction as this breakout. Not all of these set-ups will be profitable so it pays to only trade the very best set-ups.
In which case you may choose to use a few other indicators. One of the most effective you can use is the exponential moving average, or EMA for short. For the purposes of finding possible breakouts, I can recommend that you use several of these EMAs including the 5, 20, 50 and 200 period EMAs.
The next step is to wait until all of these EMAs are trading very close together because this tells you that it is almost inevitable that the price is going to move strongly upwards or downwards in the near future. When they start moving in one direction you can then jump on board, particularly if this corresponds to a breach of the corresponding Bollinger Band line.
Anyway the point I want to make is that there are lots of ways you can trade forex breakouts. As long as you have some way of both identifying range-bound markets and trading the subsequent breakout, then there is no reason why you can’t generate decent profits from this style of trading.
About the Author
James Woolley runs a website which provides details of many of the best-selling forex products including USDBOT and Forex Nitty Gritty.
