wickra/docs/wiki/indicators/statistics/Indicator-MedianPrice.md

MedianPrice

Median Price — the bar's (high + low) / 2, the midpoint of its range.

Quick reference

Field	Value
Family	Statistics
Sub-category	Price transforms
Input type	Candle (uses high, low)
Output type	f64
Output range	unbounded (price scale)
Default parameters	none (no parameters)
Warmup period	1
Interpretation	The midpoint of the bar's range, ignoring open and close.

Formula

MedianPrice = (high + low) / 2

The median price is the centre of the bar's range — it discards where the bar opened and closed entirely. It is the price series Bill Williams' AwesomeOscillator is built on, and a useful close substitute when the close is noisy relative to the range.

Parameters

MedianPrice takes no parameters — MedianPrice::new() in Rust, wickra.MedianPrice() in Python, new ta.MedianPrice() in Node.

Inputs / Outputs

From crates/wickra-core/src/indicators/median_price.rs:

impl Indicator for MedianPrice {
    type Input = Candle;
    type Output = f64;
    // update(&mut self, input: Candle) -> Option<f64>
}

MedianPrice is a candle-input indicator that reads high and low. In Python the streaming update accepts a 6-tuple or a dict; the batch helper takes high, low numpy arrays. Node and WASM expose update(high, low) and the matching batch.

Warmup

MedianPrice::new().warmup_period() == 1. It is a stateless per-bar transform — it emits a value from the very first candle.

Edge cases

• No warmup. Every candle produces a value immediately.
• Reset. mp.reset() only clears the is_ready flag; there is no rolling state to discard.

Examples

Rust

use wickra::{Candle, Indicator, MedianPrice};

fn main() -> Result<(), Box<dyn std::error::Error>> {
    let mut mp = MedianPrice::new();
    let v = mp.update(Candle::new(10.0, 12.0, 8.0, 11.0, 1.0, 0)?);
    println!("{:?}", v);
    Ok(())
}

Output:

Some(10.0)

(12 + 8) / 2 = 10. This matches the reference_value test in crates/wickra-core/src/indicators/median_price.rs.

Python

import numpy as np
import wickra as ta

mp = ta.MedianPrice()
print(mp.batch(np.array([12.0]), np.array([8.0])))

Output:

[10.]

Node

const ta = require('wickra');
const mp = new ta.MedianPrice();
console.log(mp.batch([12], [8]));

Output:

[ 10 ]

Interpretation

The median price is the most range-centric of the three transforms — it is blind to the close. Use it when the question is "where did this bar trade?" rather than "where did it settle?", or as the input to a Bill Williams setup.

Common pitfalls

• Expecting the close to matter. It does not — by definition the median price ignores both the open and the close.

References

The Median Price; the (H + L) / 2 definition is standard (TA-Lib's MEDPRICE).

See also

• Indicator-TypicalPrice.md — (H + L + C) / 3.
• Indicator-WeightedClose.md — (H + L + 2C) / 4.
• Indicators-Overview.md — the full taxonomy.