Currency Trading Indicators: Using Bollinger Bands, An Essential Tool For Technical Currency Traders

By Erina Array

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Bollinger bands on currency trading charts are used just as on equities and options trading charts, as an indicator to alert the trader to a new forming movement, breakout or trend. They are made up of three lines or bands.

The middle band is a simple moving average over a certain number of periods, generally 20. The upper and lower lines are at a fixed number (usually 2) of standard deviations calculated with reference to the number of intervals used for the center band.

Bollinger bands were invented by John Bollinger in the 1980s. The assumption behind them is that prices will mostly stay within 2 standard deviations of the mean, which here is the moving average used to plot the central line. This implies that as prices reach the upper and lower band lines, a reversal is indicated to keep the prices within the bands.

They are also an indicator of fluctuation. Wider bands indicate a more volatile market than narrow bands.

Traders use Bollinger bands in a number of various ways but these are the two most favored ones:

1. Identification of overbought and oversold markets

On the basis that prices are seeming to remain within the bands, some traders will use Bollinger bands as an indicator to sell when the price rises above the upper line and buy when it closes below the lower line. Typically they intend to close their transaction when the price returns to the central line.

Alertness is vital here, however, as these movements outside of the bands may just indicate a strong trend unfolding in that direction. So you could be caught on the wrong side of a strong price movements in some cases. John Bollinger himself recommended always examining against another indicator. Most likely the most suitable for this purpose are non-oscillating indicators such as trend lines or chart patterns.

2. Identification of contraction and forecasting breakout

As we have seen, the bands will diverge and converge in accordance with the volatility of the market over the measured past intervals. When they converge so that their area becomes narrow, this is called contraction. Some traders will act on the basis that contracting bands is an indicator of a powerful breakout and place both buy and sell orders outside the bands.

The danger here is that there can often be a false move where the prices will stretch outside the bands briefly prior to reversing. For this reason some traders rather do not act on the first move outside the bands. Again you should always check against another indicator on your currency trading charts, or use forex signals as a checking tool. A forex signal is a market forecast and a trading recommendation, which can be used as a confirmation, especially if comes from a reliable forex signal provider.

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