Moving Average Scanner is providing inaccurate results

[Blazer990]

Hello,

I was reviewing my trades for the week and noticed that my scanner missed a REALLY good pick that should theoretically have been caught.

I have a scanner that looks for all moving average breaks on the 50, 100, and 200 moving averages.

However, it seemed to have missed $RIVN specifically on July 6th.

My code:

# Moving average break bullish
open[2] is less than SimpleMovingAvg("length" = 50)."SMA" and close[2] is greater than SimpleMovingAvg("length" = 50)."SMA"
or open[2] is less than SimpleMovingAvg("length" = 100)."SMA" and close[2] is greater than SimpleMovingAvg("length" = 100)."SMA"
or open[2] is less than SimpleMovingAvg("length" = 200)."SMA" and close[2] is greater than SimpleMovingAvg("length" = 200)."SMA"

Scanner results with above code ($RIVN is missing):

Updated code by removing 200-day and 100-day conditions:

# Moving average break bullish
open[2] is less than SimpleMovingAvg("length" = 50)."SMA" and close[2] is greater than SimpleMovingAvg("length" = 50)."SMA"

Scanner results with above code ($RIVN is present):

I believe the root cause of the issue is that $RIVN has not traded for 200 days and therefore does not have a 200-day moving average. I think this may be causing the search to fail?

But that begs the question, Is there a way for me to properly account for those kind of scenarios and still show the correct results?

I don't want to have to make 6 different scanners to account for the 3 moving averages for bullish and bearish scenarios...

 

[Joshua]

This type of outlier scenario is kind of a pain.

Even if you do something like If BarNumber() >= 200 then Average(close,200) else Double.NaN it will still check to see if 200 bars worth of data are available when the script is first loaded, and it will throw an ( ! ) assertion regardless of the bar number logic.

You've basically got to compute it manually.

def WithinBars = 5;
def Cross;
Script CrossSMA{
    input Length = 200;
    plot CrossSMA;
    if BarNumber() > Length {
        CrossSMA =
            Crosses(
                close,
                ((
                    Fold Index = 0 to Length
                    with Value do
                    Value + getvalue(close,index)
                ) / Length),
                crossingDirection.ANY
            )
        ;
    } else {
        CrossSMA = No;
    }
}
if isNaN(close[-WithinBars * 2]) {
    Cross =
        CrossSMA(200)
        or CrossSMA(100)
        or CrossSMA(50)
        within WithinBars bars
    ;
} else {
    Cross = No;
}
Plot Scan = Cross;

 

[Blazer990]

Understood, Thanks for the help Joshua!