Trading Thought - Up and Down Trend Filter Differences

I was thinking about trend filters today.  It seems to be a common practice to identify the longer term trend and then trade in the direction of the trend.  This is supposed to increase the performance of strategies.  Normally, most trend filters are purely symmetric, using similar criteria to determine the long and short trend periods.  For example, you can say when the price action is above the 200 day moving average the trend is up and when the price is below the 200 day moving average the trend is down.  The criteria fro defining the trend are the same except reversed.

Up trends and downtrends have very different characteristics.  Up trends are characterized by low volatility and price action that often slowly grinds higher.  Tops generally take awhile to form.  Down trends are characterized by high volatility and prices that quickly dive down.  With up trends and down trends having different characteristics, would it be better to have different trend indicators to identify each one?

It seems like it would be better if I created an indicator that would only be used to identify up trends, then create a separate indicator that would only be used to identify down trends because they are two characteristically different periods.  For example, you could use the price crossing above a 200 day moving average to identify an up trend, then you could use price crossing below a 50 day moving average to identify down trends.  This philosophy is similar to a moving average fan or the Guppy MMA, except it only uses 2 moving averages instead of many moving averages.  From the picture below, you can see that the addition of the 50 period simple moving average seems to improve performance compared to solely using the 200 period simple moving average because it locks in profits quicker than the slower moving average would have by itself.  This may also be why many investors use the 50 and 200 day moving average crossover as a timing mechanism, although it seems it may be better to use the price crossing both instead of the averages crossing each other.  Testing would be needed to confirm which is better because whipsaws can have a significant impact of performance.

Another alternative would be using the same indicator for both trends, but using a longer time period for up trends (weeks) and down trends (days).  For example you could use a 20 period simple moving average on a weekly time frame to determine and up trend, and a 20 period simple moving average on a daily time frame to determine down trends.  This would use a slower signal to identify the characteristically slower up trend and a faster signal to identify the characteristically faster down trend.  There will be some overlap between the indicators, but this could just be used as a signal that there is an impending trend change.

There would be countless indicators to use.  The basic question is if having two different indicators to define an up trend and a down trend is better than having one indicator for both.  I think there would be some merit to an asymmetric approach to identifying trends, but it would depend on your trading system.  If you trading system shows poor symmetric performance (longs and shorts don't yield the same result), then using an asymmetric filter may be worth investigating.