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Bollinger Bands, Reading Volatility Instead of Chasing Signals

Bollinger Bands consist of a moving average in the middle and two bands above and below it, set at a number of standard deviations. They expand when volatility rises and contract when it falls. A common misunderstanding: "Price touching the upper band means sell, lower band means buy." In strong trends, price can hug a band for a long time, and fading it can be costly.

Better ways to read them:

1. The squeeze. When the bands narrow, volatility is low and a bigger move may follow. It doesn't tell you the direction.

2. Trend riding. In a strong trend, price often walks along one band. Pullbacks to the middle line can serve as entries in the trend direction.

3. Mean reversion in ranges. In sideways markets, price touching an outer band and reversing toward the middle can offer trades, with confirmation.

4. Band expansion. A sharp expansion often marks the beginning of a strong move.

How to apply:

- Identify the market condition: trending or ranging
- Choose the approach that fits
- Use structure and levels for confirmation
- Place stops logically, not just beyond the band

Caution: indicators lag. They describe what has happened and can't predict what comes next.

Use Bollinger Bands as a volatility gauge, and let price structure make the decisions.

The squeeze is the most useful part of the indicator for me, with one caveat: before a scheduled release the bands contract for an obvious reason. The market is waiting for CPI or a central bank decision, ranges shrink, and the squeeze shows up on every timeframe below the 1H. In that case the calendar tells you when the expansion is likely to come far more precisely than the bands can, and neither tells you the direction.

Where the squeeze carries more information is when nothing is scheduled. A contraction in an afternoon with no release due means participants are genuinely balanced, and the break from that often has more follow-through than a data-driven spike that retraces half its range within the hour.

Your point about price walking the band is a good warning. After a big surprise in the data, price can hug the outer band for most of the session, and fading it is how people turn a good read into a bad trade.

Reading Bollinger Bands as volatility rather than signals is the right approach. For the squeeze, an objective measure helps: band width as a percentile over the last 100 bars. A width in the lowest 10% is a squeeze, which can be backtested consistently instead of judged by eye.

And for trend riding, closes outside the band followed by closes back near the middle band often mark the end of the move.

FXS Prop Desk's percentile measure is the right idea, but on M5 the lookback matters. One hundred M5 bars is about eight hours, so at the London open the window is mostly Asia and the lowest 10 percent fires simply because Asia was quiet.

When I counted it on EURUSD, the squeeze flag was on at 07:45 London in 13 of 20 sessions. That is a clock, not a signal.

Comparing band width with the same time of day over the previous 20 sessions fixed most of it. The flag then fired on 3 of the 20, two of them on mornings with nothing scheduled, which fits LondonNewsTrader's point about unscheduled contraction.

On trend riding, two rules in the thread pull against each other. Fairman joins the trend on a pullback to the middle band, while FXS Prop Desk reads a close outside and a return near the middle as the end of the move.

For me it depends on the path. After a close outside the band I treat the pullback as exhaustion, but if price walked the band without closing outside, the middle is still an entry.

Has anyone tried the width filter on H1 with 100 bars? That spans about four days and avoids the session problem, though it says less about the next hour.