A moving average smooths a stock’s price over a chosen number of trading days by averaging its closing prices across that window, updating daily as the window moves forward. It’s used to see the underlying trend in a price series without the day-to-day noise of individual price swings.
For example, a 50-day moving average on a given day is the average of that stock’s closing prices over the previous 50 trading days. The 200-day version does the same over a longer window, reacting more slowly to recent price changes.
Moving averages are a core building block of technical screening, often used to identify trend direction or as a reference line that price is compared against. See technical indicators as screening criteria for how moving averages fit alongside other technical signals.