What is Average Price?
Average Price draws one line through the chart, placed at the average of each bar's open, high, low and close. Where a close-only line jumps to wherever the bar happened to finish, this one sits closer to the middle of the bar's activity, so it reads as a slightly calmer path through the same candles.
Average Price is a per-bar reference value. It does not smooth across bars, it does not average the bars visible on screen, and it does not signal trend direction or strength on its own.
How to use Average Price
- A calmer price line. Each point blends all four prices of its bar, so a long wick or a close at an extreme moves it less than it moves the close.
- Against the close. When the close sits well above Average Price the bar finished near its high relative to where it traded, and the reverse when it sits well below.
- As an input elsewhere. Other indicators can be pointed at the ohlc4 source, which is this same value. Plotting it on its own shows exactly what they are reading.
It is a reference line, not an entry or exit signal.
Settings
Average Price has no inputs. The four prices it averages are fixed, so there is nothing to tune.
Calculation
Each bar is calculated on its own, with no look-back:
Average Price = (open + high + low + close) / 4Because no earlier bars are involved there is no warm-up: the line starts on the first bar of the chart. For the same bar it usually lands near, but not exactly on, the Typical Price (high, low and close) and the Median Price (high and low only). The difference is how much weight the open and the close get.
Limitations
- It is not a moving average. Every value comes from one bar, so it is roughly as noisy as the candles themselves. Use a moving average if you want a smoothed line.
- It adds no new information. It is a rearrangement of prices already on the chart, so it cannot confirm anything the candles do not already show.
- The live candle moves. The current bar's value changes with every tick until that bar closes.
- It depends on timeframe. The same moment in time gives a different value on 15m than on 1D, because the open, high, low and close are different bars.
Frequently asked questions
Average Price plots the average of each bar's open, high, low and close as a line over the candles. It is often written as OHLC4. It is a single-bar calculation, so it shows where the bar traded on balance rather than where it happened to close.
All three reduce a bar to one number. Average Price uses all four prices, Typical Price uses high, low and close, and Median Price uses only high and low. Average Price is the only one that gives the open any weight, and it gives the close a quarter of the weight rather than a third.
No. The indicator declares no inputs. The calculation is fixed as the average of open, high, low and close. If you want a different blend, the Typical Price and Median Price indicators cover the other common choices.
No. Values on bars that have already closed are never revised, and since each value uses only its own bar, loading older history does not change anything. The current candle's value moves while that candle is live and settles when it closes.
Use the Add to chart button at the top of this page. It opens BTC/USDT on Binance in the Altrady Charts terminal with the built-in Average Price already applied. On any other market, open the indicator picker on the chart and choose Average Price from the Trend group.