UHL Adaptive MA

What is the UHL Adaptive MA?

The UHL Adaptive MA, credited to Uhl and often published as the corrected moving average (CMA), is an average that updates only when movement is statistically meaningful. Each bar, it compares the variance of price over the lookback with the squared distance between the average's previous value and its new target, typically the current SMA. If that distance sits within the variance, the correction factor is zero and the line simply holds its prior value; the further the distance exceeds the variance, the closer the factor gets to one and the faster the line converges on the target.

The practical effect is a stepped average that ignores fluctuations inside the recent noise band and moves decisively once price escapes it. A common two-line form applies the same correction to raw price to get a faster trend-step line and to a slow simple average for the baseline, then reads crossings between the two as the signal version of the concept.

How traders use it

• As a range-resistant trend filter: because the correction factor is zero while price oscillates inside recent variance, the line stays genuinely flat in consolidation, and slope changes only appear when movement outruns noise.
• As a crossover system: the fast corrected line (applied to price) crossing the slow corrected line (applied to a long simple average) defines bullish and bearish states, typically with fewer flip-flops than fixed-length moving average crossovers, though signals still lag turns.
• As a general smoothing stage: the variance-gated update can be applied to inputs other than price, giving any noisy series a version that only moves when change outruns the recent variance.