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mavg function simple or expotential?

I was just wondering if the mavg function is a EMA or SMA?

5 responses

mavg is SMA

Is there a function already setup for the EMA?

talib also has an EMA function, take a look at: https://www.quantopian.com/posts/talib-ema-documentation-question

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Hi Chris,

Another note is that the built-in mavg function is a carry-over from the early days of Quantopian, when they put out a handful of built-in transforms. My sense is that the current best-practice is to use the 'history' API (see the help page) which returns a trailing window of data in a Pandas data structure, and to do computations within the Pandas environment. One advantage is that it helps keep track of time (via timestamps as an index) and securities. It's also a popular and well-maintained and well-documented package. See https://www.quantopian.com/posts/working-with-history-dataframes for examples.

Grant