A Question about moving averages

Hi everyone

My first post in a forum ever so here goes. I have been reading Stan Weinstein’s Secrets for profiting in Bull and Bear markets. In it he talks about using a 30 week moving average(I’m used to only hearing about daily MA’s). As he explains it only the close on the Friday is used in the calculation, not each day like other MA’s. So how exactly would I get a weekly MA indicator on a platform like mt4, seeing as it calculates the daily open or close. Am I missing something, or doesn’t it really matter if it is daily or weekly being used?

I would appreciate any help
Thank you in advance

The 200 day exponential moving average (“200EMA”) will give a close approximation to the 30 week simple moving average. The 200EMA is widely used as a reference line - i.e. if price is below, we probably aren’t looking at a well established uptrend: similarly, if price is below, many people will ignore buy signals until after it has crossed above.

Of course, these two MA’s are pretty much the longest-term used in TA, and probably of very little relevance if you’re day-trading.

Yes, that’s perfectly true of a 30-period moving average drawn on a weekly chart.

The bars/candles on a weekly chart each represent one week’s trading (Monday morning to Friday afternoon, or Sunday night to Friday daytime, depending on the time-zone used for the settings). Moving averages, [I]unless specified otherwise[/I], are calculated from “the close” (though there are other ways of calculating them, too), and a weekly chart has only one “close” per week, and that’s the Friday one. So what he says is correct.

The differences between a 30-period moving average on a weekly chart and a 150-period moving average drawn on a daily chart (with weekends not shown) is typically very minor indeed.

If you set it to “weekly charts” instead of daily charts, then the periodicity specified for the moving average will automatically be calculated in weeks rather than in days.

And if you set the chart to “one-minute charts” then the “lookback period” for a 30-period moving average will be half an hour, etc. You see how it works, and what I mean by “lookback period”, probably?

As long as you allow for the five-fold difference between “weeks” and “days”, it shouldn’t matter to any extent worth talking about. In trading terms (with weekends not represented on the chart, which is normal for forex), 30 weeks is 150 days.