Exponential Moving Averages. Help please.

[CHARTY]

A colleague of mine asked me the formula for Exponential Moving Averages. Would anyone have this and do we know of any website where this information is publicly available? Thank you in advance for your help.

 

[Guesty]

http://www.equis.com/free/taaz/movingaverages.html

Charty,
i just happen to have been looking at this myself. The web address is above, taken from our very own "TA From A to Z" in the technical analysis section.

Hope this helps,

Kev

 

[CHARTY]

This looks fine to me! Incidentally, I remember reading from various sources that it has never been proved that Exponential MAs are "more accurate" than normal ones. Why make difficult more difficult than it is. TA should remain simple, at least in my view. Anyway, thank you very much for this!

 

[Dippers]

As someone who writes a lot of TA and trading software I would say the great thing about exponential moving averages is that you only need to know three things to calculate them, yesterday's value, the smoothing value and today's close. On the otherhand for a simple or weighted 200 day MA you need to have access to 200 day's of data to calculate the MA.

 

[darth trader]

I don't think that you do need to know all 200 values for a simple ma...
If you know yesterdays value and the value 200 days ago then that is enough to subtract the value you wish to drop off and add on today value.

 

[Uncle]

I am interested in this post as WHY one needs to do any calculation at all, unless using pen and ink to produce charts? Surely with all the software about its all done for you........all thats necessary is set your parameters for the period and whether simple exponential weighted etc and you have it.

I can only see it being of academic interest!!

John

 

[CHARTY]

Uncle, Dippers and anyone else who is reading this thread, just for the record, the softwar(s) I use is(are) relaively advanced, however, they do not support EMAs. I have never really played with them myself mainly because of this reason (not having direct access to them). Having said this, the few books I have read about TA all seem to be consistent in stating that there is no proven advantage in using EMAs (I seem to remember an article in the last edition of "Stock and Commodities" where the writer, instead, suggests using them and argue they can be more profitable).
I am happy to sign Uncle's statement that this discussion is very much academic.

I remain of the idea that Technical Analysis must be fun, easy, not complicated.

I remainn interested in reading from anyone who has a proven record of success of using EMAs, though!!