Saturday, November 7, 2009

Tips for Trading Rising Channels Long With CFDs

By Jeff Cartridge

The rising channel is a well known chart pattern that you would expect to trade on the short side, but can also be traded if it breaks out to the upside. A rising channel is formed when the price action is contained within two lines. Both the bottom line and the top line slope up, with both lines near to parallel.

Rising Channel, Ok To Trade

The breakout of the rising channel would be expected to be down and conventional wisdom would have you trading this pattern short. In reality 49% of the patterns break to the upside, so it is a 50/50 call on which direction the move will be. The upside breakout of rising channels can deliver positive returns with 41% of the patterns being profitable. The average return for the long trades is 0.53% in 8 days. This is a reasonable performance on the long side and is in fact better than trading this pattern short.

Specific Setups to Improve Profitability

When you look at the performance of a rising channel in bearish market conditions you will see the results were not as strong as they were in more bullish years. Trading a rising channel when the market is in an up trend or consolidating improves your trading results. The sector is best if it is in an up trend or a down trend, while the stock is ideally in a down trend or a consolidation. So in effect you are entering a retracement in the stock during a bullish market phase.

Avoid trading rising channel patterns that are very tall where the height of the pattern is more than 10% of the stock price. Patterns that take longer than 40 days to form also perform poorly. Better results are also achieved if the pattern does not form around one large candle, from top to bottom of the pattern.

Illiquid stock can sometimes be identified by two identical lows, closes or highs and if this is the case you are better to avoid these trades. If volume supports a rising channel breakout then the profitability of the trades improves. For volume to support the breakout, volume when the stock is going up should be greater than volume when the stock is going down.

Trading Rising Channel Can Be Profitable

By following some simple rules the profitability of trading rising channels can be improved substantially. With an average return per trade of four times the base level at 2.11% in 10 days and a hit rate of 63% rising channel can be traded very successfully when the conditions are right. These filters dramatically reduce the number of trades that can be taken from over 2000 down to just under 100, so it a small subset of the rising channels that produce the best results.

Note: Statistics for this article have been provided by Patterns Trader after analyzing over 60,000 chart patterns on the Australian market from 2000 - 2008. - 23309

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