What Is the 15-Minute Trend Strategy

Thirty-six bars on one side

The fifteen-minute trend strategy is built on fifteen-minute bars and one long average of them. A fifteen-minute bar is the open, high, low and close of a quarter of an hour, and a 50-bar average is the average of the last fifty closes, twelve and a half hours of price. Take gold on Monday 8 September 2025, 10:00 to 19:00 London time: thirty-six bars. Every close was above the average, and the average rose through the session, from 3587.65 to 3616.50, while the price went from 3598.12 to 3639.38. The side of the average the closes are on, and whether the average is rising, are the two things the strategy reads.

An escalator

Picture an escalator. Each step is a fifteen-minute bar, and the handrail is the average: it runs beside the steps and slopes the way they go. A trend on fifteen-minute bars is an escalator that keeps going for a session — the steps stay above the rail and the rail keeps rising. The strategy rides it. It reads the slope of the rail and which side of the rail the steps are on, and nothing else. On 8 September the rail rose 28.85 dollars in nine hours and every step stayed above it. What the strategy does on the escalator is written on its own card, not here.

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