Indicators can broadly be divided into two types “LEADING” and “LAGGING”.

Leading indicators
Leading indicators are designed to lead price movements. Benefits of leading indicators are early signaling for entry and exit, generating more signals and allow more opportunities to trade. They represent a form of price momentum over a fixed look-back period, which is the number of periods used to calculate the indicator. Some of the well more popular leading indicators include Commodity Channel Index (CCI), Momentum, Relative Strength Index (RSI), Stochastic Oscillator and Williams %R.

Lagging Indicators
Lagging Indicators are the indicators that would follow a trend rather then predicting a reversal. A lagging indicator follows an event. These indicators work well when prices move in relatively long trends. They don’t warn you of upcoming changes in prices, they simply tell you what prices are doing (i.e., rising or falling) so that you can invest accordingly. These trend following indicators makes you buy and sell late and, in exchange for missing the early opportunities, they greatly reduce your risk by keeping you on the right side of the market. Moving averages and the MACD are examples of trend following, or “lagging,” indicators.

Moving averages
One of the most common and familiar trend-following indicators is the moving averages. They smooth a data series and make it easier to spot trends, something that is especially helpful in volatile markets. They also form the building blocks for many other technical indicators and overlays.

The two most popular types of moving averages are the Simple Moving Average (SMA) and the Exponential Moving Average (EMA). They are described in more detail below.