Trend following

Trend following or trend trading is a trading strategy according to which one should buy an asset when its price trend goes up, and sell when its trend goes down, expecting price movements to continue.^[1]

There are a number of different techniques, calculations and time-frames that may be used to determine the general direction of the market to generate a trade signal, including the current market price calculation, moving averages and channel breakouts. Traders who employ this strategy do not aim to forecast or predict specific price levels; they simply jump on the trend and ride it. Due to the different techniques and time frames employed by trend followers to identify trends, trend followers as a group are not always strongly correlated to one another.

Trend following is used by commodity trading advisors (CTAs) as the predominant strategy of technical traders. Research done by Galen Burghardt has shown that between 2000-2009 there was a very high correlation (.97) between trend following CTAs and the broader CTA index.^[2]