Moving Average (MA)

A moving average (MA) smooths price by averaging it over a set number of recent periods, helping filter out noise and reveal the trend's direction. Common variants are the SMA (simple), EMA (exponential, weighting recent prices more heavily), WMA (weighted) and HMA (Hull, faster and smoother). Popular lengths are 20, 50, 100 and 200, and crossovers between averages are often read as trend-change signals.