Straddle trading is defined as a technique of simply placing two pending orders prior to economic news is announced, a buy-stop and a sell-stop. The core of this is to set a trap to capture market moves after a news release, which may move either way.

If the news release comes out bullish, a bullish spike would trigger the buy-stop order and hopefully the Trader will make some money. The same applies to bearish spikes. So, with straddling, direction of a news release is not so important and not relevant.