Rising Channels – Long CFD Trading Strategy
The rising channel can be traded very successfully on the long side entering the trade as the stock breaks out to the upside. This is not how you would normally trade this pattern though as the text books will tell you to trade it when it breaks down. The pattern forms when the two boundary lines that contain the price movement are almost parallel. The top and bottom line both slope up.
Rising Channel, Surprise On The Upside
Rising channels are normally patterns that would be considered to trade on the short side, but also can perform on the upside. 51% of the patterns break upwards and can deliver good returns when they do. The average gain is 0.53% in 8 days with under half of the breakouts (40%) being profitable. There are better patterns to trade on the long side, but selecting the right conditions can make trading a rising channel attractive.
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.
Rising channel patterns with a very tall height relative to the share price (10% or more) produce smaller returns along with very long patterns (40 days or more). When a rising channel forms around one large candle that reaches both boundaries it produces inferior results.
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.
Rising Channels Can Deliver Good Profits
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.
Jeff Cartridge has been trading CFDs since 2002 and created the website LearnCFDs.com A Simple Timeless Method for Huge Gains
Tags: Consolidation, Top And Bottom, CFDs, Bottom Line