......the accuracy of indicators I do not use indicators because I see them as being the equivalent of your pulse. And I'd rather have the doctor listen to my heart than just feel my pulse!!
What if you had hypertension ? Oh ... He wouldn't have diagnosed it. Your heart can speak for all of your organs ? No .. So you'd be a bad doctor for not using indicators. Because you overlook the pulse of your patient ! Oh ... What a bad doctor you'd be. What a bad speaker too. Don't give indicators so much weight in your metaphor, For convincing us that you're right by overlooking them ! See : Does God need a compass for drawing perfect circle ? No & Since indicators are for me what a compass is for God, Then I do not need indicators for playing the perfect trade ...
For averages, smoothing will cause "lag" as well as reducing high frequency amplitudes and distorting the signal some. May be handy as a tool to compare latest prices toward a smoothed "old" price, or for other uses one may dream up. Though, smoothing is not "pure" lag, only shifting the data forward in time will be "pure". All indicators are old news, as price and volume are old news. But price isn't random, it's very often a kind-of "continuous" signal with small amount of gaps. random(1000) should be what we can call random, and would gap almost all the time. So liquidity, market mechanisms and transparency are causing a signal to trade on: price per tick/time. Even though price and volume are old news, does not mean most participants are reading and playing the markets perfectly according to TA. On the contrary, participants have all sorts of reasons to participate, many timeframes, goals, greeds, fears, limitations and errors, thus creating chaos. Even the bots will do that to any market, so is something basic when participants behave differently. TA is every possible analysis on price and volume, so does not really dictate any one behaviour either. Now, indicators based by price and volume by themselves, are useless compared to raw price and volume data. What really matters is what you do with those data, and for that you may use mathematical formulas and/or logic. Some call these indicators, but they're just math, formulas that do nothing by themselves. So, beware of indicators, not just because they're inferior to the raw data, but if you want to trade it, you also need to figure out why, as well as how!
They do ... and K-Pia's right, of course. But I think that when the OP refers to "accuracy" she actually means "value as predictors in relation to trade entries" - in other words the research (like so much else that's written about indicators, and trade entries for that matter) stems from a fundamentally flawed belief-system about how indicators are useful.
1) Just as accurate as in years past. My results are just as reliable as they used to be. Useless before. Useless now. TA is still for selling seminars. Not for prop trading.
So, is it the MA3, MA5, MA10, MA100, MA1000 or MA10000. There is always one MA(n) hitting the target. Why not take yesterday's (high-low)/2 = average. Buy above, sell under or vice versa, what you believ is best. Or take p&f. No time to consider, just direction. Wikipedia: n statistics and research design, an indicator is an observed value of a variable, or in other words "a sign of a presence or absence of the concept being studied".[1] For example, if a variable is religiosity, and a unit of analysis is an individual, then that one of potentially more numerous indicators of that individual's religiosity would be whether they attend religious services; others - how often, or whether they donate money to religious organizations. Absence of ability to think for yourselve. Good WIKI description: leads to religiously donating money to God of money aka Wall$treet. GO
The problem is not the lag but the fact that a moving average is a estimate of future price. All estimates have errors. The longer the MA the larger the error.