when the tenkan line and kijun line are crossing back and forth the price lacks a trend or is moving in a choppy fashion and therefore the crossovers will not produce reliable trade signals 
on its own the kijun line can also be used for analyzing price momentum when the price is above the kijun line it means the price is above the 26 period mid point and therefore has an upward bias if the price is below the kijun line it is below the midpoint price and therefore has a downward bias example of a kijun linethe following chart shows an example of an ichimoku cloud indicator applied to the spdr s p 500 etf spy in the chart above the kijun line is red and the tenkan line is blue after a brief selloff the tenkan moved above the kijun in early 2016 this was a potential buy signal the two lines did not cross again until 2018 which would have provided the sell signal for most of this time the price stayed above the kijun line and the cloud helping to confirm the uptrend the difference between the kijun line and a moving averagethe kijun line is a moving mid point based on the high and low over a set number of periods it is calculated by adding the high and low and dividing by two a moving average ma is different it sums up the closing prices of a set number of periods and then divides that by the number of periods a 26 period kijun line and a 26 period ma will produce different values and therefore provide traders with different information the limitations of using the kijun lineunless there is a very strong trend the kijun line will often appear near the price when the kijun line is often intersecting or near the price it is not as useful for helping to assess the trend direction the same goes for crossovers with the tenkan line when the price trends strongly crossover signals may be quite profitable yet many crossovers signals will be unprofitable if the price fails to trend following the crossover the kijun line is reactionary in that it shows what price has done in the past there are no predictive qualities inherent in the indicator s calculation the kijun line should ideally be used in conjunction with the other elements of the ichimoku cloud indicator along with price action and other technical indicators 