Indicators

Every indicator is derived from price, not separate from it, and knowing what maths is running underneath one changes how much weight it deserves on your chart. They’re all just price, transformed A moving average smooths price into a lagging line. Useful for context, always a step behind. A moving average takes the last N closes and averages them, which smooths out the noise but means the line is always describing where price has already been rather than where it’s heading. An oscillator like RSI takes recent gains and losses and turns them into a bounded number, so it can flag when a move looks stretched, but it’s still built entirely from the same closes a chart already shows you. Nothing an indicator displays is new information; it’s existing price data run through a formula to make one property of it easier to see at a glance. ...