Bollinger Bands on MT5: Fade the Band on M5, Follow It on M30 — the Same 20/2 Switched Sides

This is the practical page of a three-part Bollinger Bands series. My Bollinger strategy test ran three rules and 12 settings on EURUSD M5, and my Bollinger Bands vs RSI comparison put the band against RSI and Stochastic. Here is how to set the indicator up on an MT5 chart and which chart to put it on.

If you use MT4, my Bollinger Bands settings guide for MT4 covers the same indicator there.

How do I add Bollinger Bands to MT5?

Bollinger Bands ship with MetaTrader 5, so there is no file to download.

1. Open the chart you want, for example EURUSD.
2. Go to Insert → Indicators → Trend → Bollinger Bands. You can also find it in the Navigator window under Indicators → Trend and drag it onto the chart.
3. In the Parameters tab, set Period, Deviations and Apply to. Leave Shift at 0 — a shifted band is drawn over bars it was not calculated for.
4. In the Colors tab, give the middle line a different colour from the two bands. The middle line is the exit in every rule below, so it should be easy to see.
5. Press OK. To save the setup for other charts, right-click the chart → Templates → Save Template.

For custom indicators — files you download rather than built-in tools — the steps are different; they are in how to add indicators to MT5.

What do the Bollinger Bands settings in MT5 do?

On EURUSD M5, the default 20/2 put 11.34% of all closes outside a band. Deviation 3 is so wide that on period 10 price closed outside it only 10 times in three months — too rare to trade. The full period-by-deviation grid is in the strategy test; the short version is that on M5, 10/2.5 was the only setting of 36 that stayed positive after costs, and only by 0.05 pips per trade.

Does “Apply to: Typical price” help?

Typical price — the average of high, low and close — gave about a fifth more signals and changed the result by 0.05 pips per trade or less. Leave it on Close.

Which timeframe should I use Bollinger Bands on in MT5?

This is the part that matters. I rebuilt 30-minute, 20-minute and the other charts from the same 16,926 EURUSD 5-minute bars and ran three rules on the default 20/2, with the same exit on every chart: close through the middle band, a 1:1 stop, or a 24-bar time limit on that chart. 1-pip cost per trade.

• Fade: close outside the band, trade against it.
• Re-entry: close outside, then close back inside, trade against it.
• Walk: close outside the band, trade with it.

Net pips per trade after a 1-pip cost; the best rule on each chart is in bold. (The M5 row counts two more trades than in the strategy test because the bands start a few bars earlier here.)

Read it top to bottom and the best rule changes sides. On the fast charts, M5 and M10, a close outside the band was a place to fade. From M15 up to M30, following it did best. On EURUSD’s 5-minute chart the band break was usually the end of a small move; on the 20- and 30-minute charts it was more often the start of a real one.

H1 flips back to the fade, but with 74 trades in three months it is the thinnest row in the table, and the walk rule there had only 65 trades. I would not build anything on H1 from this sample alone.

Which results held in both halves of the data?

A positive row in a three-month test can be one lucky month. So every positive result was split on July 15, 2026 — EURUSD fell in the first half and rose in the second.

Two results survived with a reasonable number of trades, and both are the same idea: walk the 20/2 band on a 20- or 30-minute chart. M20 is only available in MT5 — MT4 has M15 and M30 but nothing between — which makes this one of the few tests on this site where MT5’s extra timeframes were not a disadvantage. In my Supertrend MT5 vs MT4 comparison, the MT5-only M10 and M20 charts both lost; here M20 held up.

These are still small numbers: +0.55 and +0.83 pips per trade, over 185 and 126 trades. They are leads worth a longer test, not a finished system — the same caution my in-sample vs out-of-sample test explains.

Do Bollinger Bands work the same way on gold in MT5?

I ran the same three rules with 20/2 on 13,736 XAUUSD 5-minute bars, with a $0.30 cost per trade, as in my gold vs EURUSD comparison.

Dollars per ounce. All three lost, but the order was different from EURUSD: on gold’s 5-minute chart, walking the band came closest to breaking even and fading was the worse idea. If you trade gold with bands, the hour matters as much as the rule — my gold scalping by session test measured the same bars hour by hour.

How should I set up Bollinger Bands in MT5, then?

• Keep the defaults: Period 20, Deviations 2.00, Apply to Close, Shift 0. No other setting was reliably better.
• Pick the rule by the chart. On M5 and M10, a close outside the band is a fade idea, and even the best fade lost after a 1-pip cost. On M20 and M30, a close outside the band is a trend idea.
• Exit at the middle line. Every rule here closes when a bar closes through it. If you only look at one line of the three, look at that one.
• Do not add RSI as confirmation. In my Bollinger vs RSI test, fades RSI agreed with did worse than the ones it did not.
• Trade on closed bars. The bands on the forming bar move with every tick; every result here is taken on the close.

Frequently asked questions

Where are Bollinger Bands in MT5?

Insert → Indicators → Trend → Bollinger Bands, or in the Navigator window under Indicators → Trend. It is a built-in indicator, so nothing needs to be installed.

What are the best Bollinger Bands settings for MT5?

The default 20 and 2.00 on Close. On 16,926 EURUSD 5-minute bars, no setting of 36 made more than 0.05 pips per trade after costs, and changing Close to Typical price moved results by 0.05 pips or less. The chart you use mattered far more than the settings.

What is the best timeframe for Bollinger Bands?

In this test, M30 and MT5’s M20, trading in the direction of a close outside the band: +0.83 and +0.55 pips per trade after a 1-pip cost, positive in both halves of the data. On M5 every rule lost after costs.

Should I fade or follow a close outside the Bollinger Band?

It depended on the chart. On EURUSD M5 and M10 the fade did best; on M15, M20 and M30 following the break did best. On gold M5, following was closer to break-even than fading.

What does Shift do in MT5 Bollinger Bands?

It moves the drawn bands a number of bars left or right. A non-zero shift draws the bands over bars they were not calculated from, so leave it at 0 for trading.