Glossary / Trend & momentum

Golden cross

Also called: moving average crossover · death cross

A golden cross describes the session on which a shorter-window moving average crosses above a longer-window one. The inverse arrangement — the shorter average crossing below the longer — is conventionally called a death cross.

How it is measured

How is golden cross measured?

Track two moving averages of different window lengths on the same price series. The crossover is dated to the session where the sign of the difference between them flips. Both averages are arithmetic on closes that have already printed, so the crossover date is knowable only after the fact.

Why it matters

Why does golden cross matter to a swing trader?

The crossover is one of the most widely watched chart events in retail trading, which makes it worth knowing as vocabulary even for a trader who does not use it. Mechanically it is a lagging restatement: by the time a short average has crossed a long one, the price move that produced the crossing has already happened. Swing traders who use it treat it as confirmation of a period that has passed rather than as a signal about the next one.

In Tapeline

Does Tapeline use golden cross?

Not used in Tapeline's score. The score does not read moving-average crossovers.

Related

See this in the product

How Tapeline scores stocks

Related terms

Moving average
A moving average is the average closing price of a security over a fixed number of recent sessions, recalculated each session so the window rolls forward.
DMA stack
A DMA stack describes a chart where several day-moving averages of different lengths sit in order — the shortest above the next-shortest, and so on down to the longest.
Trend
A trend describes the direction price has generally travelled over an extended window, and how consistently it has travelled that way.

Back to the full glossary.

General information about market vocabulary, written to be descriptive rather than prescriptive. Not investment advice — see the risk disclosure.