Know Sure Thing (KST)

Momentum over four time spans at once, weighted towards the longest.

What it measures

KST takes four rates of change over increasing windows, smooths each with a simple moving average, and adds them with weights 1, 2, 3 and 4. With signalSMA, a simple moving average of KST is added as a signal line.

How traders read it

Traders read KST crossing its signal line or zero as a change in the broader trend. Because it blends four spans, it turns more slowly than a single ROC.

Formula

RCMA1 = SMA(ROC(first ROC periods), first SMA periods), and likewise RCMA2 to RCMA4
KST = RCMA1 × 1 + RCMA2 × 2 + RCMA3 × 3 + RCMA4 × 4
signal = SMA(KST, signalSMA)

Each ROC window must be longer than the one before.

Settings and output

Call: kst(firstROCPeriods, secondROCPeriods, thirdROCPeriods, fourthROCPeriods, firstSMAPeriods, secondSMAPeriods, thirdSMAPeriods, fourthSMAPeriods, signalSMA)

Setting	Chart default
`firstROCPeriods`: First ROC Periods	10
`secondROCPeriods`: Second ROC Periods	15
`thirdROCPeriods`: Third ROC Periods	20
`fourthROCPeriods`: Fourth ROC Periods	30
`firstSMAPeriods`: First SMA Periods	10
`secondSMAPeriods`: Second SMA Periods	10
`thirdSMAPeriods`: Third SMA Periods	10
`fourthSMAPeriods`: Fourth SMA Periods	15
`signalSMA`: Signal SMA Periods	9

What you get: a list of 2, in this order: 1. a number (“KST”); 2. a number (“KST Signal Line”).

Warm-up: with kst(10, 15, 20, 30, 10, 10, 10, 15, 9), it asks for 31 bars of history and a run-up of 24, and its first value came on bar 54 of the example data.

Chart

Know Sure Thing (KST) drawn by its own code on example prices

The prices are made up, hourly, and the same on every page, so the chart shows how the indicator behaves, not how a market behaved.

In an algorithm

function onIntervalClose() {
  const lines = kst(10, 15, 20, 30, 10, 10, 10, 15, 9);
  if (OPEN_POSITIONS_COUNT === 0 && lines[0] > lines[1] && lines[0] > 0) {
    openPosition("BUY", { quantity: 10000, stopLossPips: 30, takeProfitPips: 60 });
  }
}

Without signalSMA, the eight-setting form gives a single number.