Both technical and fundamental analysts like to use averages rather than raw data in order to smooth out variance commonly found in periodic economic releases, price action and other data sets.

For example, fundamental analysts in FX like to look at the average of the notoriously volatile month Non Farm payroll statistics in order to gauge the true direction of the trend. Similarly technical analysts looking at price action will often look to the 20 period simple moving average of price (the mean of the previous 20 days of trading) in order to see if overall prices are rising, falling or staying the same.

• arithmetic mean
• geometric mean