Andrews' Pitchfork — Alan Andrews' median-line method

Look at almost any uptrend and you will notice that price rarely climbs in a straight line — it ripples around an invisible axis, sometimes running ahead of it, sometimes slipping below. In the 1960s Alan Andrews, an American teacher of technical analysis, decided to draw that axis. The result was Andrews' Pitchfork: a tool of three parallel lines that looks like a garden fork and has a single job — to show where the centre of a trend wants price to return and where it is likely to meet support or resistance.

What Andrews' Pitchfork is and how to draw it

The pitchfork is built from three pivot points, usually labelled P0, P1 and P2. The first, P0, is a clear high or low that begins the move — the anchor the whole construction grows from. The next two, P1 and P2, are the following pair of opposite extremes: in an uptrend, first a local high and then the low of the correction that came after it. With those three points in place, the platform draws the rest automatically.

The heart of the tool is the median line. It is found in a simple way: the software locates the midpoint of the segment connecting P1 and P2, then runs a straight line from P0 through that midpoint and onward into the future. That central line is what gives the pitchfork its meaning. Parallel to it, two outer lines are drawn — one through P1 and one through P2. The result is a channel: the median in the middle, with parallel tines on either side. In every popular platform you simply choose the Pitchfork tool and click the three points in turn, and the channel appears on its own.

Why price gravitates back to the median line

The whole theory rests on one of Andrews' observations: most of the time, price tends to return to the median line. In other words, the median behaves like an axis of balance around which the market oscillates, while the tines mark the limits of those swings. In an uptrend the lower tine acts as support and the upper tine as resistance, and the median itself reports on the strength of the move — if price keeps reaching it, the trend is healthy; if it stops reaching the median, that is often the first hint of weakness.

It is worth being precise about what this "gravity" really is. It is not a law of physics, nor a statistic confirmed by independent studies, but a practical drawing rule that organises how you look at a trend. The mechanics are familiar anyway: broken support turns into resistance and the reverse — the very effect that governs ordinary horizontal support and resistance levels. The pitchfork simply dresses that effect in sloping, parallel lines instead of flat ones.

"A trendline drawn along the peaks of an advancing market is called a channel line or return line." — John J. Murphy, Technical Analysis of the Financial Markets, New York Institute of Finance, 1999.

How to trade reactions at the pitchfork lines

In practice the pitchfork offers three typical situations. The first is a bounce off the lower tine in an uptrend — when price drops to that line and pushes away from it, this is a candidate spot for a long position in line with the trend. The second is a reaction at the median line: price that reaches the middle of the channel and turns can be a chance to add to or open a position in the direction of the trend. The third is a touch of the upper tine, which in an upward move plays the role of resistance and more often invites taking profit than opening a fresh long.

The key rule is this: do not enter on the touch itself. Wait for confirmation of the reaction — a clear reversal candle, for example an engulfing candle or a hammer at the lower tine. Place the stop loss just beyond the line you are trading, because a decisive break through it invalidates the whole scenario. The target is usually the next pitchfork line: from the lower tine the natural first target is the median, and the next one is the upper tine. With that layout the reward-to-risk often works out favourably, though it remains a probability and not a promise.

Andrews added warning lines to this picture — further parallel lines spaced outside the channel at equal intervals. When price leaves a tine and only halts at one of these lines, you get a map of possible reaction points beyond the original channel. It is a useful addition when a move turns out stronger than the starting pitchfork assumed.

A hypothetical example step by step

Let us trace a purely hypothetical, illustrative layout, just to show the logic. EUR/USD is rising. We take a clear low at 1.0700 as P0, the point the move started from. Price then breaks up to a local high at 1.0900 — that is P1 — and corrects to a low at 1.0820, which we accept as P2. The tool draws a median running from 1.0700 through the midpoint of the 1.0900 to 1.0820 segment, plus two parallel tines.

A few days later price drops again and touches the lower tine around 1.0860. We do not buy straight away. We wait for a bullish engulfing candle to form there — that is our confirmation. We plan the long entry at its close, with the stop loss a few pips below the lower tine, because a decisive move lower means the channel no longer holds. The first target is the median line, and if the move gathers strength, the upper tine. The whole scenario remains one possibility, which the market may just as easily reject.

An honest caveat: choosing the points is subjective

Here is the part many guides skip. Andrews' Pitchfork is only as good as the points you anchor it on — and choosing them is inherently subjective. Two traders looking at the same chart will mark P0, P1 and P2 in slightly different places and get two different channels, sometimes leading to opposite conclusions. The slope of the median can shift sharply depending on which low you treat as the start of the move. This is not an objective indicator with a single value, but a way of telling a story about the structure of a trend — which is why it pays to ground yourself in the broader technical-analysis material first.

That is why the pitchfork is best treated as an organising tool rather than a standalone system. Confirm reactions with a plain Fibonacci retracement or a horizontal level, set the layout inside a broader trend-following approach, and never drop your risk management. If you want a variant with a differently calculated starting point, see the article on the Schiff pitchfork. And remember the hard statistic: forex and CFDs are high-risk instruments — according to ESMA data from 2018, between 74 and 89 percent of retail accounts lose money. No set of parallel lines changes that.

What to do tomorrow

1. Open a chart of one pair you know well on the H4 timeframe, choose the Pitchfork tool and plot it on the last clear trend, deliberately picking the P0, P1 and P2 pivots rather than clicking random extremes.
2. Scroll back through the chart and check how price reacted at the median line and at both tines — count how many times the lower tine acted as support and how many times it was broken without any reaction.
3. Draw the same pitchfork again, but this time take a different low as point P0, and compare the two channels — this exercise is the quickest way to see for yourself how much the result depends on subjective point selection.
4. Practise the full entry layout on a demo account for at least two weeks, always waiting for a candle that confirms the reaction and limiting the risk on any single trade to no more than one percent of your account balance.