Trend-following strategies produce good profit, when markets fall or rise. But when we face with range market conditions, such trading strategies give a lot of false signals for opening deals. What should we do? The answer is simple - we must have rules for range markets. Sometimes it's not easy, and trading in range need more knowledge, experience and deep analysis than trading in the direction of the main trend. But we should use such market conditions and make profit. First of all we have to identify, when we have range market conditions.
We have range market conditions, when:
- 3 Moving Averages with periods 20, 50 and 100 don't move in one direction. They are close to each other and intertwine
- ADX is below level 20 or 25.
When we meet such conditions, we have range market. We must not trade based on reversal signals from Moving Averages. For range markets we look for reversal signals only from Bollinger Bands. RSI and MACD must confirm price reversal. We focus on price action near Bollinger Bands and it's better to have strong support or resistance levels which could stop price. We should look at higher time frame and get confirmation that market is in range also or just bulls or bears have no power for moving price against our potential trade. If we open trade based on range rules, but on higher time frame we have trend market conditions, we have good chances to close such trade with loss. Also note, if we trade in trend market conditions, we can have good Risk/Reward ration, in range our profit targets are close and for making profit we’ll need more profit trades. That’s why we need more confirmation for opening trades. So, let's look at the rules of trading strategy for range market conditions.