What Moving Averages Can Teach Us About Healing

Oct 1, 2026

Every line on your chart is a story about the past

Every moving average on your chart is really answering one question: how much should the past matter right now? It turns out that’s the same question healing asks.

This morning I read Steve Burns’ excellent breakdown of the four main types of moving averages traders use Steve’s Article. If you want the technical side, the formulas and how to actually trade them, start there… Steve teaches this better than almost anyone.

But as I read, something else kept tapping me on the shoulder. Each of these lines is a different way of weighing history. And so are we. Every one of us is walking around with an internal moving average, quietly deciding how much yesterday gets to drive today.

The Simple Moving Average: your grounded adult self

The SMA gives every day in its window equal weight. In a 10-day SMA, today counts exactly as much as nine days ago. It’s slow, steady, and hard to rattle.

That’s the voice of your grounded adult self. The part of you that wrote your trading plan on a calm Sunday. The part that can look at one red day and say, “That’s one candle. The trend is still the trend.”

The SMA isn’t exciting. It won’t get you in at the exact bottom. But it rarely panics, and it almost never mistakes a single bad day for the end of the world. When I talk about trading from your Self rather than your survival, this is what I mean… a nervous system that can hold the whole window in view at once.

The Exponential Moving Average: the inner child who feels everything now

The EMA leans hard into recent data. The newest price gets the most weight, and older prices fade fast. It reacts quickly, which is wonderful in a fast market… and exhausting when it’s your emotional life.

This is the inner child. Children live in the most recent candle. When something hurts, it doesn’t feel like one bad moment inside a long, mostly safe life. It feels like the whole world. Forever.

And that young part of us comes to the trading desk. After a loss, the EMA inside you takes over. That last red trade gets nearly all the weight. Suddenly you’re not a trader with a solid six-month record… you’re someone who just got hurt and needs to make it stop. Right now. That’s when revenge trades happen. That’s when the plan disappears.

The EMA isn’t bad. Responsiveness kept us alive as kids. The problem is when it’s the only line on the chart.

The Smoothed Moving Average: how old wounds really work

This is the one that stopped me in my tracks. The SMMA never fully drops old data. Every price that ever happened stays in the calculation. But the oldest prices carry less and less weight as time goes on, until they barely move the line at all.

That is the most accurate description of healing I’ve ever seen in a trading article.

So many of my clients come in hoping healing means deletion. If I just do enough work, the childhood stuff will finally be gone. It won’t. What happened to you is part of your data set. It always will be.

But here’s the good news… it doesn’t have to drive the line. Healing doesn’t erase the old prices. It changes their weighting. The wound is still in the formula, it just stops deciding where today’s line goes.

The SMMA also filters out noise to show the true trend. That’s what a healing nervous system does too. It stops overreacting to every flicker and starts seeing the bigger story of who you’ve become.

The Volume Weighted Moving Average: why some moments shape us more

The VWMA weights each price by how much volume traded there. A quiet day barely registers. A day with massive volume pulls the line hard in its direction.

Our inner lives work exactly like this. Not every childhood moment carries the same weight. Most days were quiet, low-volume candles. But some moments came with enormous emotional volume… the day a parent didn’t come home, the look on someone’s face when you failed, the time you learned that needing something wasn’t safe.

Those high-volume candles are still pulling on your line today. They’re why one losing trade can feel like a catastrophe, while a dozen winners barely register. Your nervous system isn’t averaging fairly. It’s weighting by volume, and the loudest moments of your childhood are still trading heavy.

This is also why insight alone rarely changes behavior. You can know a moment was long ago. But if it traded at enormous volume, it still has its hand on the line.

Reparenting is reweighting

Reparenting is how we change the weighting. Not by erasing the past, but by adding new data… new, calm, safe candles, one day at a time, until the old high-volume moments stop dominating the average.

Every time you pause instead of revenge trading, you add a new data point. Every time you honor a stop and speak kindly to yourself afterward, you add another. Every time the grounded adult in you sits with the scared child instead of letting them take the controls, the line shifts a little.

It’s slow. It’s not linear. Healing is a spiral, not a staircase… you’ll pass the same spot again, but from a higher place each time. That’s how a smoothed average moves too.

Before your next trade, try a simple check-in. Ask yourself: which line is trading right now?

• My SMA: I’m following the plan I made when I was calm.
• My EMA: I’m reacting to the last trade, and I want the feeling to stop.
• My VWMA: an old, heavy feeling is louder than the chart in front of me.

If the answer is anything but the first one, that’s not a failure. That’s information. Step back, breathe, and run through H.A.L.T.S. — am I Hungry, Angry, Lonely, Tired, or Sad? Then come back when your grounded self is the one holding the mouse.

The past stays in the formula. You choose the weighting.

Your history will always be part of your calculation. That’s not a flaw in you… that’s how every honest average works. But you get a say in how much each candle counts from here.

The gap between knowing your rules and following them is never a discipline problem. It’s a nervous system problem. And nervous systems heal.

If this landed for you, I’d love to talk. I offer a free 30-minute discovery call where we can look at which lines are really driving your trading, and what it might feel like to change the weighting. You can book it here on the site: https://thehealingtrade.com/contact/, or reach me at devin@thehealingtrade.com.

Healing the trader heals the trading.