How to Add an Overlay to an Indicator

It can be helpful to add an overlay, such as a moving average or Bollinger Bands, to an indicator panel on your chart. These overlays are often used with price indicators (in the same way they are used on the main price plot of the chart), but they can also be used with other indicators to smooth out indicator values or show indicator values falling outside typical ranges.

Learn More: Overlays | Indicators

The brief interactive demo below shows you how to add an overlay to any indicator on your chart. The more in-depth tutorial walks you step-by-step through adding a SCTR indicator with a 20-day moving average of those SCTR values to a SharpChart.

Interactive Demo: Adding an Overlay to an Indicator

This interactive demo will show you step-by-step how to add an overlay to an indicator panel on your SharpChart.

Click on the blue Continue button below to start the interactive demo.

Tutorial: Adding a Moving Average to a SCTR Indicator

In this step-by-step tutorial, we'll add a SCTR indicator panel to the chart, and then add a 20-day simple moving average to the SCTR indicator to smooth out the SCTR values.

Create the SharpChart

Step 1: Enter the Ticker Symbol

There are several ways to create a new SharpChart, but the easiest is to enter the symbol in the Create-a-Chart box at the top of the page and then click Go.

Step 2: Clear Indicators and Overlays

To simplify the chart, let's remove any Indicators and Overlays from the default chart. The quickest way to do that is to click the Clear All link in the Overlays section and repeat the process with the Clear All link in the Indicators section.

Note: You may want to make other changes to the chart, such as changing the size or the color scheme. In this example, we're using the “Spruce” color scheme.

Add and Configure the SCTR Indicator

Before you can add an overlay to an indicator on your chart, you've got to add the indicator. Here we'll add a SCTR indicator panel at the bottom of the chart.

Step 3: Add SCTR Indicator to the Chart

Select SCTR Line from one of the empty indicator dropdowns. This will add an indicator panel to the chart showing historical SCTR values for the chart's symbol. As with other indicators, you can change the position of the indicator panel using the Position dropdown menu.

Once these changes have been made, your chart should look similar to the one below.

Step 4: Add a Moving Average Overlay to the SCTR Indicator

In the Indicators section, click the "Overlay" dropdown menu for your SCTR Line, and select Simple Moving Average. By default, it is configured for a 50-day SMA, but you can change this in the Parameters box next to the Overlays dropdown menu. We'll change it to a 20-day SMA.

For more details about the available parameters for each overlay, please see our SharpCharts Parameter Reference.

Once you've made these changes, the final chart should look something like this:

The moving average applied to the indicator panel smooths out the choppy SCTR values.