Period

Your quick reference guide to essential trading terms and concepts
    • Asian Session
    • Ask Price
    • Balance
    • Bid Price
    • Boiler Room
    • Dealing Desk
    • ECN (Electronic Communication Network)
    • Equity
    • European Session
    • Foreign Exchange Market
    • Forward
    • Index
    • Jawboning
    • Laissez-Faire
    • Latency
    • Liquidity
    • Lost Decade
    • Lot
    • Market Depth
    • Micro lot
    • Mini Lot
    • No Dealing Desk (NDD)
    • North American Session
    • Period
    • Re-quote
    • Real Body
    • Sentiment
    • Slippage
    • Spot
    • Spot Rate
    • Spread
    • STP (Straight-Through Processing)
    • Swap
    • Tick
    • Trading Session Timetable
    • Velocity

Period

In trading, a period is a standardised unit of time used in the monitoring of an asset. For instance, on a candlestick chart each candlestick refers to one period, which depending on the time frame set by the trader could refer to 1 minute, 5 minutes, 15 minutes, 30 minutes, 1 hour, 4 hours, 1 day, 1 week and 1 month. In the case of a moving average being calculated, the period data used will vary according to the time frame being charted. So a 26 period simple moving average at a chart duration of 1 hour entails the closing prices from 26 hours of trading activity added together and divided by 26. A 26 period moving average charted at the 1 minute duration encapsulates the sum of the closing prices from 26 minutes of trading activity and divided by 26.

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