Tool Tutorials

52-Week Range Tutorial

Understanding 52-Week Range Position

This tool measures where an asset's current closing price sits relative to its absolute high and low prices over the trailing one-year period. Expressed on a standardized scale from 0 to 100, this metric provides an immediate readout of current price location.

range position = (close − 52-week low) ÷ (52-week high − 52-week low) × 100
  • A reading of 0 means the asset is trading precisely at its 52-week low.
  • A reading of 100 means the asset is trading precisely at its 52-week high.
52-week high  $555.45 100 52-week low  $349.20 0 today  $387.74 reads 18.7 the band 0 is the year's low, 100 is the high, and today's close sits somewhere in between

Take the example above. The 52-week range runs from $349.20 to $555.45, and the stock closed today at $387.74. That gives a range position of 18.7, which puts the price about a fifth of the way up from the low. Anything reading 50.0 is sitting exactly halfway between the yearly high and low.

Keep in mind

Range position only tells you the current location. It says nothing about the path taken to get there.

  • A stock that has slowly drifted lower for nine straight months can read 18.0.
  • A stock that gapped down hard yesterday can also read 18.0.
See today's readings

Matching Criteria

The tool ranks today's reading against every reading that ticker has ever printed, not against a fixed scale.

The raw number on its own does not compare across stocks. SPY spends most of its life near its highs, so 92.0 is an ordinary day for it. AMD swings wider and holds near its highs far less often. Matching on the raw number would put an ordinary SPY day beside an unusual AMD one.

So the 0 to 100 reading is turned into a percentile against that ticker's own record first, and only past days at the same percentile are used.

One more condition sits on top of that. The matched set also accounts for the stock's recent direction, so a reading taken while price is pushing higher is not compared against the same reading taken while price is falling.

TickerRaw Range PositionRelative Percentile RankContextual Market Meaning
SPY92.058th PercentileRoutine Baseline: SPY spends the vast majority of its history trading near annual highs.
AMD93.592nd PercentileExtreme Outlier: AMD rarely sustains levels this close to its 52-week ceiling.

Tool Glossary

The Basics

52-week range

Where price sits between its 52-week low and its 52-week high, scored 0 to 100. A reading of 0 means it is on the low, 100 means a new high, and 50 means the midpoint of the year's range.

52-week high and low

The highest and lowest prices over the past year. They are the two ends of the band the reading is measured against.

The Readings

Percentile

Where a reading sits against its own history, from 0 to 100. A 90th-percentile reading has been higher only 10% of the time. That is a more useful statement than the raw number on its own.

Matched days

The past sessions that met the same conditions you set. Every statistic the tool prints is measured from these and nothing else.

Sample

The number of matched occurrences behind a statistic. A 70% hit rate off 8 occurrences and a 70% hit rate off 400 are not the same claim. The sample is printed next to every result for that reason.