Hull Moving Average explained, and how to write it as a condition

What it measures

The Hull starts from weighted moving averages, which count recent bars more heavily than old ones. It takes a weighted average of half the chosen length, doubles it, subtracts a weighted average of the full length, and then smooths that difference over the square root of the length. The doubling-and-subtracting is the trick: the half-length average is closer to price than the full-length one, so twice one minus the other overshoots towards where price is heading, which cancels much of the lag. The final smoothing takes the jaggedness back out.

The result follows turns noticeably sooner than an EMA of the same length and sits closer to price in a trend. The cost is that it overshoots: at a sharp turn the Hull can bend past where price settles and come back, and it will cross a flat price more often than a slower average would. It is a moving average with the lag traded for a little extra movement of its own.

The one setting

The period, twenty by default. Because the Hull is already fast for its length, people tend to use longer periods than they would for an EMA doing the same job — a Hull of 50 behaves something like an EMA of 20 in how quickly it turns, while being smoother. As always, it is counted in bars of the timeframe the condition reads.

Writing it as a condition

These are the comparisons SixOne8 offers, in the builder's own words.

1. Price above / price below. The bar closed on that side of the line. A state.
2. Price crosses above / crosses below. True only on the bar the close moves through the line. The moment, and the usual trigger.
3. Rising / falling. The line itself is higher, or lower, than the bar before. On a Hull this is a more useful condition than on most averages, because the line's own direction changes early enough to mean something.

HMA(20) on 1h  ·  rising

Read it as a sentence: on the 1-hour chart, the twenty-period Hull Moving Average is higher than it was an hour ago. That is what the scanner evaluates at each hourly close.

Hull, EMA or SMA?

For a context condition on a slow timeframe — "price is above the 200-day" — the choice barely matters and the simple average is the one everyone else is watching. For a trigger on a fast timeframe, where every bar of lag is a bar further from the turn, the Hull's earlier bend is the whole reason to pick it. The moving averages guide covers the EMA and SMA and the difference between crossing and being above, all of which applies here unchanged.