Awesome Oscillator with AntiStep CorrectionHere is the well-known Awesome Oscillator (AO), which I use to present the real purpose of this post: a function that provides step correction for simple moving averages (SMAs).
We all know that any indicator based on moving averages lags real-time movement. Normally this is fine, but just after large ("step") changes in level, the pre-step values that are still within the SMA window cause the result to falsely reflect continued movement, even when real-time values remain flat.
To counter this, when a step change of a configurable size is detected, I temporarily shrink the SMA window size to include only those values occurring since the step change, and then allow the size to increase to normal length as we move away from the step change. This is accomplished within the antistep_sma() function.
Note that this will cause SMAs of different lengths (e.g. those used in the AO) to be temporarily equal, until the shorter of the two reaches its normal size and begins to leave the longer one behind again. You can see this above, where the AO, which is the difference of two SMAs, goes to 0 immediately after a sufficiently large step change--configured to 0.5% in this case.
