Which Simple Moving Averages

MBehr55 · 03-04-2008, 09:03 AM

If you were going to use Simple Moving Averages for buy/sell signals for say a Mutual Fund. Which would you recommend for medium and long term trends? The particular niche I need this for is the federal gov's Thrift Savings Plan and their life cycle funds. I can use a website called TSPMoney to graph the individual funds with two moving averages. I'm wondering about a 10 or 20 sma vs. 50 sma for medium term and then maybe a 20 sma vs. 100 or 200 sma for long term.

**alexchartfilter** · 03-06-2008, 07:49 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by MBehr55

If you were going to use Simple Moving Averages for buy/sell signals for say a Mutual Fund. Which would you recommend for medium and long term trends? The particular niche I need this for is the federal gov's Thrift Savings Plan and their life cycle funds. I can use a website called TSPMoney to graph the individual funds with two moving averages. I'm wondering about a 10 or 20 sma vs. 50 sma for medium term and then maybe a 20 sma vs. 100 or 200 sma for long term.

To be totally honest I would not use sma's for buy sell signals. I would use them to confirm my trend. If you are using them to confirm your trend you may also want to look at keltner channels.

I personally find that SMA's lag too much and choose to use trendlines on the charts (I do tend to print a lot). I also include a MACD for my moving average component since it works best in trending markets while the oscillator tends to work best in a generally sideways trending market (ie: year of year flat/slight up or down with high up/down price movement) (in this newsletter DJIA chart shows a sideways trending market)

What I can suggest for you is the following moving average cross systems should serve you better than any individual SMA.

You may like the GMMA - guppy multiple moving average or a 4-9-18 cross.

Let me know if this is what you were looking for.

Alex

MBehr55 · 03-08-2008, 06:12 AM

Thanks, I'll do some charting with the 4-9-18 cross to see how it looks. It will take some trial and error because the website I use only has two MAs available at any one time. I may need to find a "life cycle" mutual fund that mirrors the TSP L2030 fund so I can perform further technical analysis.