For Business

Indicators

What Is a Technical Indicator

A technical indicator is a number worked out from the price bars and drawn on the chart, either on the price or in a box under it. This paper shows you one drawn from the euro's real daily candles in 2025 — the twenty-day average — the idea as dials on a dashboard that read the same road, an indicator on the price beside one under it, the twenty closes that add up to one point of the line, and where the indicators live on your platform.

Difficulty
Beginner
Reading time
5 min
Pages
8
Reviewed by
Saman Rahbar

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A line worked out from the price

A technical indicator is a number worked out from the price bars and drawn on the chart. The blue line over the euro's candles is one. It is not a second price. It is the average of the last twenty closes, done again every day, and drawn where the price is drawn: on 10 October 2025 the twenty closes averaged 1.17247, so that is where the line sits. Every indicator, however grand its name, is this — arithmetic on the bars, made into a picture.

A dial on the dashboard

The picture is a car's dashboard. Through the windscreen is the road, which is the price. Under it are dials — speed, fuel — and each is a reading taken from the same journey: how fast the road is going by, how much is left. The dials know nothing the road does not. They put one part of it in a shape that is quick to read. An indicator is a dial on the chart's dashboard, and the road is still the thing that matters.

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