Technical indicator reference

RSI measures the speed and magnitude of recent price changes on a 0–100 scale to identify whether an asset is overbought or oversold.

MACD (Moving Average Convergence Divergence) shows the relationship between two EMAs of price, typically 12 and 26 periods.

The Stochastic Oscillator compares the current closing price to the high-low range over a lookback period (default 14).

StochRSI applies the Stochastic formula to RSI values rather than price, making it a 'second derivative' momentum indicator.

CCI measures how far price has deviated from its statistical mean, expressed in units of mean absolute deviation.

Williams %R is a momentum oscillator ranging from 0 to -100 that measures where the current close falls within the high-low range over a lookback period (default 14).

Rate of Change (ROC) measures the percentage change in price over a specified number of periods.

Momentum is the simplest possible momentum reading: the raw price change over a fixed lookback (default 10 periods) — today's close minus the close N bars ago.

TRIX applies a triple-smoothed exponential moving average to price, then takes the percentage rate of change of that triple-smoothed line.

The Ultimate Oscillator, developed by Larry Williams, combines buying pressure measured across three different timeframes (short, medium, long — default 7/14/28 periods) into a single weighted reading.

The Awesome Oscillator, created by Bill Williams, measures market momentum by comparing a short-term view of price (5-period SMA of the bar midpoint) against a longer-term view (34-period SMA of the bar midpoint).

TSI double-smooths the day-to-day price change with two successive EMAs (default 25 then 13 periods), and does the same to the absolute price change, then expresses the ratio as a percentage.

CMO is closely related to RSI — both measure the balance of up-moves versus down-moves over a lookback period — but CMO uses the raw sum of up and down moves directly rather than RSI's smoothed (Wilder) averaging, and it's scaled to oscillate symmetrically from -100 to +100 around a zero midpoint instead of RSI's 0–100 scale around 50.

KST, developed by Martin Pring, combines four separate rate-of-change calculations (using progressively longer lookbacks, each smoothed with its own moving average) into one weighted composite.

PPO is MACD expressed as a percentage rather than an absolute price difference — it's the difference between a fast and slow EMA, divided by the slow EMA.

The Squeeze identifies periods of unusually low volatility by checking whether the Bollinger Bands have contracted to sit entirely inside the Keltner Channel — a condition that historically precedes sharp, often violent breakouts.

The Coppock Curve is a long-horizon momentum indicator originally designed to identify major bottoms in broad market indices, built from a weighted sum of two long-period rate-of-change calculations (traditionally 14 and 11 months on monthly charts), smoothed with a 10-period weighted moving average.

The Fisher Transform, developed by John Ehlers, converts price into a value that approximates a Gaussian (normal) distribution.

Balance of Power measures which side — buyers or sellers — controlled each trading session, by comparing where the close ended up relative to the open against the full high-low range of the bar: (Close − Open) / (High − Low).

ADX measures the strength of a trend, regardless of direction, on a 0–100 scale.

Supertrend is a trend-following indicator built on ATR (Average True Range) that plots a single line above or below price to indicate trend direction.

The Ichimoku Cloud is a comprehensive trend system with five components: Tenkan-sen (conversion line, 9-period), Kijun-sen (base line, 26-period), Senkou Span A and B (form the 'cloud' or Kumo), and Chikou Span (lagging line).

Aroon identifies when a new high or low occurred within a lookback period (default 25).

The Vortex Indicator consists of two lines (VI+ and VI-) that capture the idea of upward and downward movement using the range of current bars relative to the prior period's extremes.

The Choppiness Index (CHOP) measures whether a market is in a trending or ranging/sideways mode, outputting values between 0 and 100.

Parabolic SAR (Stop and Reverse) places dots above or below price to indicate trend direction and potential stop-loss levels.

DPO strips the long-term trend out of price to expose the shorter-term cycles underneath it.

The Random Walk Index tests whether a security's price movement over a given period is greater than what pure random chance (a random walk) would statistically be expected to produce.

The Alligator, created by Bill Williams, uses three smoothed moving averages of different lengths — the Jaw (13-period), Teeth (8-period) and Lips (5-period), each shifted forward in time — to visualize whether a market is trending ("awake and eating") or ranging ("asleep").

EMA gives more weight to recent price data than older data, making it react faster to price changes than a Simple Moving Average (SMA).

The Hull Moving Average, developed by Alan Hull, is specifically engineered to solve the fundamental tradeoff every moving average faces: smoothing versus lag.

DEMA is designed to reduce the inherent lag of a standard EMA using a specific formula: 2×EMA minus an EMA-of-the-EMA.

TEMA takes the same lag-reduction concept as DEMA one step further, using a triple-application formula (3×EMA − 3×EMA-of-EMA + EMA-of-EMA-of-EMA) to strip out even more of the cumulative lag inherent in exponential smoothing.

VWMA is a moving average where each price in the lookback period is weighted by that period's trading volume, rather than every period counting equally the way a standard SMA does.

The simplest and most widely used trend tool in technical analysis: the arithmetic mean of closing price over the last N periods.

ATR measures market volatility by calculating the average of true ranges over a lookback period.

Bollinger Bands consist of a middle band (20-period SMA) with upper and lower bands plotted 2 standard deviations above and below.

BB Width measures the width of Bollinger Bands as a percentage of the middle band, providing a pure volatility metric.

NATR is ATR expressed as a percentage of the closing price rather than in raw price units.

Keltner Channels plot a volatility-based envelope around an EMA midline, with the upper and lower bands set a multiple of ATR away from that midline.

The simplest possible volatility band: the upper line is the highest high of the last N bars, the lower line is the lowest low of the last N bars.

Elder Ray, developed by Alexander Elder, splits each bar's price action into two separate measures: Bull Power (the high minus an EMA, showing how far buyers pushed price above the average) and Bear Power (the low minus the same EMA, showing how far sellers pushed price below the average).

The Mass Index, developed by Donald Dorsey, looks for "reversal bulges" — a specific pattern where the trading range (high minus low) widens significantly and then narrows again — without caring about price direction at all.

The Ulcer Index measures downside risk specifically — not volatility in general, but the depth and duration of drawdowns from recent highs.

MFI is a volume-weighted RSI that uses both price and volume data to identify overbought/oversold conditions.

OBV accumulates volume on up-days and subtracts it on down-days, creating a running total.

CMF measures the amount of money flowing into or out of a security over a period (default 20 days).

VWAP is the average price of a security weighted by volume over a trading session.

The Elder Force Index, from Alexander Elder, combines price change and volume into a single number: the change in closing price multiplied by the volume on that bar, smoothed with an EMA.

PVT is a cumulative running total, similar in spirit to OBV, but instead of simply adding or subtracting the full day's volume based on whether price went up or down, it weights each day's volume contribution by the actual percentage price change.

NVI tracks cumulative price changes only on days when volume was lower than the prior day, ignoring high-volume days entirely.

PVI is the direct mirror of NVI: it tracks cumulative price changes only on days when volume was higher than the prior day, ignoring quiet days entirely.

The A/D Line is a cumulative running total, similar in structure to OBV, but instead of using the simple up-day/down-day rule, it weights each bar's volume by where the close landed within that bar's high-low range (the Close-Location Value).

Linear Regression fits a straight line to price data over a lookback period using least-squares methodology, showing the 'equilibrium' price based on recent data.

Z-Score measures how many standard deviations the current price is from its moving average.

Standard deviation is the foundational statistical measure of how spread out price (or returns) has been around its own average over the lookback period — it's the same calculation that builds the width of Bollinger Bands.

Kurtosis measures the "tailedness" of a return distribution — specifically, how much of the distribution's variance comes from rare, extreme outlier moves versus frequent, everyday small moves.

Skewness measures the asymmetry of a return distribution — whether extreme moves have tended to favor one direction over the other.

Entropy, borrowed from information theory (Shannon entropy), measures how random or unpredictable a security's recent price movements have been.

Variance is standard deviation's underlying building block — literally standard deviation squared.

A volatility-based envelope that measures the range around mid-price values to define inner and outer levels.