the market’s long-term center of gravity · Price trend & timing — reading the chart
Take the closing price for each of the last 200 trading days and average them. Do that every day and you get a slow, smooth line running under the jumpy daily price — where the stock has traded, on average, over roughly the past year.
Whether the long-term trend is up or down. Price above the 200-day line = an uptrend, buyers in control. Price below = a downtrend — and in this app’s own backtest, the single most reliable warning sign. Because it averages a year of prices, one bad day barely moves it, so it cuts through the daily noise that panics people.
About 200 trading days ≈ one year. Long enough to ignore short-term wiggles, short enough to still turn when the real trend changes.
It’s the backbone of the Trend score and the rule the backtest said mattered most: never buy support in a downtrend. A name trading below its 200-day gets a REVIEW signal — the app makes you re-confirm the thesis before adding, instead of catching a falling knife.
200-DMA = (P₁ + P₂ + … + P₂₀₀) ÷ 200
A stock spends months climbing above a rising 200-day line (healthy uptrend), then breaks below it. Nothing about the daily price looks alarming, but the long-term trend has flipped — exactly the moment the app switches the name to REVIEW and asks you to re-check the story before adding more.