How to Calculate the Moving Average with Pyhton
In this tutorial, we will cover how to calculate the Simple Moving Average (MA) and the Exponential Moving Average (EMA) of a Time Series using the Pandas library in Python.
We will also take a brief look at what the Simple Moving Average and the Exponential Aveareg is.
What is the Moving Average?

The Moving Average is calcualted to identify the trend direction of a stock.
- The Moving Average can be used to determine the support and restance levels.
- Often categorized as a lagging indicator, as it is trendfollowing.
- The longer period used, the greater the lag.
- The 50-day and 200-day Moving Averages are considered by many the as important trading signals.

- The Simple Moving Average is taking the arithmetic mean over a specific number of days.
- The Exponential Moving Average is a weighted average with more importance in recent days. This makes it a more responsive indicator.
Watch how to calculate the Moving Average with Python
See the video to see how it can be done using the Python library pandas or see the code below.
Step 1: Read some Financial Historic Time Series Stock Prices
We will use Pandas DataReader to read some historic stock prices. See this tutorial for details.
import pandas_datareader as pdr
from datetime import datetime
ticker = "AAPL"
start = datetime(2019, 1, 1)
data = pdr.get_data_yahoo(ticker, start) # You can also add end-date
print(data.head())
Resulting in this.
High Low Open Close Volume Adj Close
Date
2019-01-02 39.712502 38.557499 38.722500 39.480000 148158800.0 38.505024
2019-01-03 36.430000 35.500000 35.994999 35.547501 365248800.0 34.669640
2019-01-04 37.137501 35.950001 36.132500 37.064999 234428400.0 36.149662
2019-01-07 37.207500 36.474998 37.174999 36.982498 219111200.0 36.069202
2019-01-08 37.955002 37.130001 37.389999 37.687500 164101200.0 36.756794
Step 2: Calculate the Simple Moving Average with Python and Pandas
Calculating the Simple Moving Average (MA) of the data can be done using the rolling and mean methods.
data['MA10'] = data['Close'].rolling(10).mean()
Where here we calculate the Simple Moving Average of 10 days. You can change it to fit your needs.
Step 3: Calculate the Exponential Moving Average with Python and Pandas
It is a bit more involved to calculate the Exponential Moving Average.
data['EMA10'] = data['Close'].ewm(span=10, adjust=False).mean()
There you need to set the span and adjust it to False. This is needed to get the same numbers as on Yahoo! Finance.
Bonus: Visualize the result
If you want to see the data on a chart you can use the following code.
import pandas_datareader as pdr
from datetime import datetime
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
data = pdr.get_data_yahoo('AAPL', datetime(2021,1,1))
data['MA50'] = data['Close'].rolling(50).mean()
data['EMA50'] = data['Close'].ewm(span=50, adjust=False).mean()
data[['Close', 'MA50', 'EMA50']].plot(figsize=(10,8))
This should result in a chart similar to this one.

Want to learn more?
This is part of the course of Master Technical Analysis with pandas.
In the next lesson you will learn about Calculating MACD with Pandas DataFrames.
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