Moving Average (MA)
A smoothed average of price over a set period — the workhorse that filters noise to reveal trend.
A moving average plots the average price over a trailing window (say 50 or 200 days), smoothing out short-term noise to make the underlying trend visible. The exponential variant (EMA) weights recent prices more heavily, reacting faster than the simple version.
MAs serve as dynamic support/resistance and trend filters — price above a rising 200-day MA is a common definition of a healthy uptrend. Crossovers between fast and slow MAs generate the widely-cited golden cross and death cross signals. Like all technical tools, MAs describe the past cleanly and predict the future imperfectly; their value is as trend context, not prophecy.