Can channel pattern trading be profitably automated?

Financial markets, such as the global foreign exchange (FX) market, often exhibit trending behaviour. Within such trends, the market level oscillates with changes in market consensus. Continued oscillations of this type result in the formation of wave patterns within the underlying trend known as channels, which are used by technical analysts as trade entry signals. A sample space of such channels has been constructed from a set of US dollar/British pound Spot FX tick data from 1989?1997 using pattern recognition algorithms and the profitability of trading using such patterns has been estimated. A number of attributes of the resulting collection of channels has been subjected to statistical analysis with the aim of classifying patterns that can be traded profitably using a number of simple trading rules. Results of this analysis show that there exist statistically significant links between the channels' attributes and profitability.