However, volume doesn’t indicate potential reversal or continuation of the previous trend as it doesn’t appear out of the ordinary when one of them happens.
Underlying behavior
The next thing we’ll look into is the underlying behavior. As we learned, a megaphone pattern occurs when traders are trying to get control of the asset. The bulls keep buying and driving the price of the asset higher while the bears, on the contrary, try to counteract this development and sell the asset while the price is high, driving it lower and lower. The price swings keep forming new highs and lows, and if you draw two trendlines through these points, you will notice that the lines diverge in different directions. As a rule, this uncertainty and rising tension usually ends with one party abstaining from further action and the other party dominating the market. The pattern ends with the trend moving in the direction of the winning party, either continuing or reversing the previous trend.
How to trade megaphone patterns
Despite their inconclusive nature, megaphone patterns provide many trading opportunities. Megaphone traders can be incorporated into multiple strategies, depending on a trader’s trading style.
Breakout trades
The first way to trade a megaphone pattern is to trade breakouts. A breakout happens when the price breaks one of the trendlines and closes outside the pattern. Breakouts can be bullish or bearish, and traders take them as the confirmation of a pattern and the direction of the following trend.
Trading breakouts means waiting until the price closes outside the pattern, confirming the completion of the megaphone pattern, and entering a trade when the direction of the price movement is clear. Note that it’s better to wait a bit to see if the breakout fails before making a decision.

When it comes to the minimum target, the common strategy is to measure the distance between the highest high and lowest low of the pattern, draw a line of the same distance from the breakout point in the direction of the new trend, and then place the minimum target at 60% of the resulting line’s length.
As for the Stop Loss, the general rule is to draw a line through the second Pivot Point High (for a bullish trend) or Pivot Point Low (for a bearish trend) and place a stop-loss order at this level.
Swing trades
Since megaphone patterns consist of multiple swings, this is a good pattern to do swing trades. Swing traders capitalize on volatile markets, using the indecision of the majority of traders to their advantage. In case of megaphone patterns, swing traders can try and trade within the pattern, buying when the price hits a new lower low and selling when it marks a new higher high. This usually requires them to wait for the confirmation that the price hasn’t broken one of the trendlines.
But it’s also possible to trade on swings inside the pattern. All you need to do is to use the horizontal lines formed by the peaks and troughs of the pattern as well as the pivot line. Moreover, it’s also possible to use Fibonacci retracement levels to find potential support and resistance lines to trade right within the megaphone pattern.

Failure
Like any other pattern, a megaphone chart pattern can fail to break out. Despite that, it’s still possible to trade it, though it’s important to identify the failure correctly. It’s actually quite easy because a megaphone pattern is considered a failure if the price doesn’t break one of the trendlines after the fifth swing. So if you see this pattern in a bull market, for example, and notice that the price bounces off a trendline after the fifth swing, you should consider going short when the price falls below the closest support level.

In this case, you can use levels formed by Pivot Point 4 as your first trading target and put the second potential target at the lower trendline of the pattern. As for the stop-loss order, you can put one at the level where the price failed to break out of the pattern after the fifth swing. You can also apply the risk/reward ratio in accordance with your own trading strategy.
Bottom line
In this article we learned about a megaphone chart pattern. A megaphone chart pattern occurs when the market is going through a volatile period and traders can’t decide on what the actual price of the asset in question should be.
Megaphone patterns can be bullish and bearish, but it’s hard to predict the direction of price movement and find the best entry and exit points without using additional indicators and technical analysis tools.