Moving Average Speed Can Spot Turns Before They Happen

Moving averages are perhaps the most common indicator in the world of technical analysis, highlighting trends over time by smoothing out values.

Because they show direction, moving averages inevitably rise or fall. These changes are often obvious in retrospect, but now they can be spotted as they happen with our MA Speed script.

This indicator calculates one of five kinds of moving averages (including exponential and volume-weighted). Users can set the length (50-day SMA by default). They can even pick whether it calculates based on open, high, low, close, etc. (Close is the default.)

MA Speed plots the simple 1-day percentage change similar to an oscillator at the bottom of the chart, color-coding for positive or negative values.

The chart above applies MA Speed to the S&P 500. The result is pretty interesting because we can see how its 50-day SMA was falling at 0.67 percent in March, the fastest decline since December 2008. But this month it’s flattened quickly and is on pace to turn higher in the next session or two.