Moving averages, as a position rather than a crossing

What it means

A simple moving average is the mean of the last N closes. An exponential one weights recent closes more heavily, so it turns sooner and lags less, at the cost of reacting to single bars.

Both are descriptions of where price has been. Neither contains any information about where it is going, which is the whole difficulty with how they are usually quoted.

How we detect it

The engine computes a twenty-bar exponential average and a fifty-bar simple one, and reports two things: whether price closed above or below the slower average, and whether the faster average is above the slower.

It does NOT report a golden cross or a death cross. Those names carry a prediction the arrangement does not support, so the same two lines are described as what they are.

For a long time this product computed both averages and published neither, on the rule that a function is not a read. The reading exists now because it was asked for as a reading, and it arrives with a concept page and a capability row like everything else that is named.

When the read carries information

• The series is long enough that the slower average covers a meaningful stretch.
• The reader takes the two as a description of the recent past, which is all they are.

When it misleads

• In a range price crosses both averages constantly and the arrangement changes every few bars while nothing happens.
• After a gap, an average includes prices from before the gap for its whole window.
• The popular thresholds — fifty and two hundred — are conventions. Nothing in a market knows about them.

How it reaches you

It appears when a question asks about moving averages, and it is one line about position rather than an event.

No arrangement of the two is ever presented as a reason to buy or sell.