Hand-marking averages before you trust the screen
Plotting a handful of closes by hand reveals how far price sits from the mean — something software smooths away.
We still ask new seats to plot ten weekly closes and compute a short average with a pencil. The arithmetic is not the point. Feeling the distance between the latest close and the mean changes how you treat a touch of the average on a live screen later.
Students who skip the hand exercise often treat every kiss of the 20-day line as a signal. Students who have drawn the line once tend to ask whether the trend filter agrees before they lean in.
Keep the ritual short: one sheet, one average, one filter sentence. Then return to your usual charting software with a clearer sense of what the lines are actually summarizing.