How do set a 50 day Simple Moving Average (SMA) on the chart?

Modified on 2011/12/09 11:56 by Rob Rrickson (CTS) — Categorized as: Uncategorized

If you want a 50 day SMA, you make the bar interval 1 day and the SMA periods 50.

An SMA set to 1 period is only going to average a single bar against itself (e.g. that won’t be a an average at all, but just follow the bars price.)

Also, if you are putting a 50 day (or even a single day) SMA on a 10 minute chart, you are pretty much only going to see a straight line. That line will be the SMA’s value for that day. That’s because a moving average (or any study for that matter) based on a daily bar interval is not going to have an intra-day value. It will only have a single value for the whole day.

Finally a 50 day bar interval is going to generate 1 bar for every 50 days traded. The SMA will smooth those bars.