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The Three Bollinger Regimes

tldr:

  • Full-range oscillation (chop/range): Price swings band-to-band, crossing the midline often.
  • Uptrend mode: Price hugs upper band, retraces only to the mid-band (20MA), then pushes back up.
  • Downtrend mode: Price hugs lower band, retraces only to the mid-band, then continues down.

✨ The Three Bollinger “Regimes”​

  1. Range (Band-to-Band):

    • Price touches both top and bottom bands regularly.
    • Mid-band often acts as just a “passing point.”
    • MACD → frequent crossovers, low histogram amplitude.

full range crosses

While there are two portions in this area that could be considered clear trends (at a smaller timeframe), the majority of the time we are swinging all the way from top band to bottom and back again.

  1. Uptrend (Upper-Band Hugger):

    • Price rallies to top band, pulls back to mid-band, repeats.
    • Bottom band often ignored completely.

uptrend

  1. Downtrend (Lower-Band Hugger):

    • Price dumps to bottom band, rallies only to mid-band, repeats.
    • Top band ignored.

downtrend

Notice that for both the uptrend and downtrend we rally back to around the mid-band, but never fully to the other band.

Trend Continuation (Midline Testing):​

When the price rallies back toward the mid-band, this is a trend continuation test.

trend testing

Zooming out to see how these chain together​

Now here is the a full diagram showing how this regime behavior cleanly maps to trends.

clean map to trends

The yellow lines mark the times that the price moves through the full bollinger range. Notice how during the trends, price is fully on the appropriate side of the mid line... only dropping down to test it, but never more than about 65% through the full band (So in the area of the mid-band, maybe slightly on the other side).

So what about the V that we see between the two uptrends. IMO you need to zoom out to longer timeframes to see what is going one here:

longer timeframe

The purple represents the full range swings on the larger timeframe (3 day candles). Notice that our daily "full range swing" (the V), is actually a midpoint test on the larger timeframe.

Although i am trying to keep this article purely focused on the bollinger regimes concept, I've brought in MACD to show that on the larger timeframe we dont get a crossover during our V swing. The size of the histogram bars decrease as expected, but we never actually enter negative territory in the larger timeframe.

The Speed of The Midline Test:​

Another thing I've noticed in a few places is that trend setting/reversals is occuring when the testing takes a long time (rather than quickly bouncing back to the expected band)

trend setting

It's also interesting that in this case the side of the bollinger band that the candles are generally on is the direction of the trend that is beginning to form.

On the number of "tests"​

As with S&R, the number of tests of the midline seems to be limited to just a few before we get the full range one / the end of the trend.

Multi Timeframe Coherence​

(see chatgpt, this will evnetually be a signal on qlir)

Hugging the Band vs. Midline Testing​

There is also a difference between hugging the top/bottom line and frequent testing of the midline. That seems to indicate strength.