Today we’ll talk about a pattern that occurs many times in the forex market, on most of the pairs and on any time frame. We will describe the parabolic price structure and how you could use it for trading. However, we must begin by saying there are many forms of patterns that occur over and over in the markets. You just need concentration and pattern recognition skills in order to be able to spot them. You don’t need to apply the basics of fundamental analysis, although you could have a higher edge by combining both.
Parabolic structure – a common pattern in the forex market
In order to help you understand better what we are talking about, let’s take an actual example. Below you can see the GBPUSD on the 5 minutes chart. We’ve spotted a parabolic structure yesterday, March 30th 2018.
Source: dailyfx.com
Let’s describe the actual context. If you zoom out to the daily chart, you will see that Cable had been under pressure for a few days in a row. However, as the end of the month was near, some profit taking might have been in play. That is why we see the leg up on the left of our screenshot.
After a few hours of buying, the price ran into a resistance level, located at 1.4060 and then started to consolidate. What stands out is the shift in the price relationship with the 20 EMA.
We’ve used the 20 EMA to help us spot a change in the market mood and you can see that sellers were showing signs of strength once the price action had begun to treat the 20 EMA as resistance, not as support.
There were a few rejections off the EMA, which is good news for sellers, as they could enter the market at a better price. What resulted is a nice parabolic-shaped price formation which can be used efficiently especially for with-trend trading.
Hope you will manage to spot formations like this one in the future and maybe you will be able to spot other kinds of formations as well. This type of recurring formations happen all the time, you just need the experience to see them unfolding.