Tenkan-sen

One of the five lines that make up the Ichimoku system, conventionally translated as the conversion line or turning line. Like its slower counterpart it is a midpoint of a range rather than an average of closes: the highest high and the lowest low of its window are added and halved, so only two bars in the window enter the calculation and everything between them is discarded.

The short window is what distinguishes it. It steps to a new level as soon as a fresh extreme prints or an old one drops out, so it turns earlier and more often than the Kijun-sen, and it spends less time flat. The relationship between the two lines is what the system's traditions read, a crossing being the most cited of them, and it is the same construction as a moving average crossover computed on a different quantity.

Its default window length is a convention from the system's original publication rather than the result of any test, and charting packages differ in whether they let it be changed. Because both lines are range midpoints, the pair carries no information about where price spent its time or about how the range was distributed, which is the trade the construction makes in exchange for its responsiveness.