Its gaps get bigger and more frequent at every level higher from the ATL.
SOXS is a 3x inverse semiconductor ETF, which makes it one of the gappiest instruments a retail trader is likely to touch. We looked at every session it has traded, 4,121 of them from March 2010 to July 2026, and asked three things: how often it gaps, how often those gaps get filled, and whether either changes as the ETF runs further above its all-time low.
Neither happens as often as you might expect.
| Gap Size | Gaps | % Filled | % Challenged | % Never Touched |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| All gaps | 2,736 | 24.6% | 22.7% | 52.7% |
| 1 to 2% | 1,013 | 33.6% | 30.5% | 35.9% |
| 2 to 3% | 631 | 25.4% | 23.9% | 50.7% |
| 3 to 5% | 647 | 18.7% | 17.5% | 63.8% |
| 5 to 10% | 368 | 11.7% | 12.0% | 76.4% |
| Over 10% | 77 | 11.7% | 6.5% | 81.8% |
Trying to fade these gaps loses roughly three times out of four, and the bigger the gap, the worse the odds get. Once a gap exceeds 10%, four out of five are never touched at all.
A gap of 5% or more turns up on 5.7% of sessions when SOXS is within 10% of its ATL, and on 51.1% of sessions once it is more than 100% above it.
The farther SOXS is above its all-time low, the bigger and more frequent the gaps become.
That looks like a useful signal.
But there’s a catch.
When SOXS is far above its low, it almost always means it just had a big upward spike. After a big spike, the ETF is already more volatile than usual.
So the higher gap rates you’re seeing are mostly just the normal result of higher volatility and not some special effect of “being far from the low.”
In other words, the distance above the low is mostly just a stand-in for “this thing has been moving a lot lately.” Once you already know how volatile it is, the distance itself doesn’t add much new information.
Volatility more than doubles across the bands, rising from 3.68% to 8.71%, while the gap keeps pace almost exactly. The ratio sits at 0.34 near the low and reaches 0.41 when price is 50 to 75% above ATL. Across the first five bands, which cover 97% of SOXS’s history, the ratio barely moves.
| Above the Low | Sessions | Median 10-Day Swing | Median Gap | Gap as a Multiple of the Swing |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 0 to 10% | 1,913 | 3.68% | 1.27% | 0.34× |
| 10 to 20% | 865 | 4.53% | 1.59% | 0.35× |
| 20 to 30% | 446 | 5.34% | 2.08% | 0.37× |
| 30 to 50% | 494 | 6.13% | 2.34% | 0.37× |
| 50 to 75% | 267 | 7.00% | 2.79% | 0.41× |
| 75 to 100% | 78 | 7.95% | 3.48% | 0.45× |
| Over 100% | 47 | 8.71% | 5.17% | 0.66× |
The last row is the one place the ratio breaks ranks, at 0.66 against 0.34 to 0.45 everywhere else. That would mean gaps turn outsized at extreme extension rather than merely tracking volatility. It rests on 47 sessions spread over sixteen years, so it is worth watching rather than trusting.
SOXS gaps on two out of every three sessions, and most of those gaps remain unfilled. Only about one in four fill by the close, and more than half never fill at all. Fading them just because they gapped is a weak trade, and it gets weaker the bigger the gap is.
Both gap frequency and gap size rise as price moves further above the all-time low. The pattern looks clean, like a staircase. But it is mostly a volatility effect. Once you measure each gap against how much the ETF was already moving, distance above the low adds almost nothing.
TradeIntel’s Spike Analyzer shows how far each leveraged ETF sits above its all-time low, how many cycles it has completed, and the size of its previous moves.
Open the Spike Analyzer
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