An intraday reversal represents a dramatic directional shift within a single trading session: price expands away from the market open in one direction, hits an extreme turning point, and subsequently reverses through the opening price to settle on the opposite side.
To qualify as a valid reversal, a trading session must satisfy two mandatory conditions:
Minimum expansion threshold: price must travel a required minimum distance away from the opening price before reaching its turning point.
Opening boundary crossing: the closing price must settle on the opposite side of the session's opening price.
Up first, then all the way back down through the open. Both halves have to happen for the day to count.
Missing either condition disqualifies the session from the reversal record.
The pivot and the handback percentage
The turning point of the intraday move is formally designated as the pivot:
Bearish reversal pivot: the session high (price runs up first, then collapses).
Bullish reversal pivot: the session low (price drops first, then surges).
The reversal magnitude percentage measures the total percentage handback from that extreme pivot to the session close:
Reversal Magnitude % = | (Close − Pivot) / Pivot | × 100the absolute distance from the pivot back to the close, as a percentage of the pivot
Worked example: IBM
IBM opened at $75.00 and ran 4.52% above that to a session high (pivot) of $78.39, then closed at $71.74:
A fixed percentage threshold (for example, requiring a 3% intra-session move) cannot be applied uniformly across the market. A 3% expansion represents a severe structural shock for a low-beta index ETF, but routine intra-day movement for a high-volatility single stock.
Asset-specific expansion baselines
The engine dynamically sizes the minimum travel threshold according to each asset's own historical daily volatility profile, so it scales with how much the name normally moves:
Ticker
Minimum travel required
Volatility profile
SPY
0.90%
Macro index baseline; tight travel requirement
KO
1.34%
Low-beta consumer staple baseline
MSFT
1.67%
Mega-cap tech baseline
NVDA
2.97%
High-momentum semiconductor baseline
TSLA
3.82%
High-beta growth baseline
INTC
4.26%
Elevated single-stock volatility baseline
Measured 22 July 2026.
Each name's bar is how far price must travel from the open before a session is even considered. SPY qualifies after 0.90%; INTC needs 4.26%, nearly five times as far.
Core analytical principle
Intel (INTC) must travel nearly five times further than SPY, relative to its open, before the engine will even consider the session for reversal qualification. The event must represent a true statistical anomaly for that specific equity.
The significance of reversal rarity
Requiring both a significant volatility expansion and a complete crossing of the opening price makes confirmed intraday reversals exceptionally rare:
Sample size
IBM has produced 28 bearish reversals across its entire record. Reversal signals produce small historical samples by design, so the event log is the quickest way to see how small the sample is.
Because true reversals occur so sparingly across an asset's whole record, forward projections derived from them rest on intentionally small sample sizes.
Chapter 3
Price Projections
The engine projects across three fixed horizons: the next trading day, one week (5 trading days) and one month (21 trading days). Every card shows the exact future date it refers to, so there is no ambiguity about which session is being measured.
Three measures on each card
Green / red odds: the split between comparable days that closed higher and those that closed lower over that horizon.
Avg green return: the average gain of only the comparable days that closed higher.
Avg red return: the average loss of only the comparable days that closed lower.
IBM's read after that bearish reversal:
Horizon
Target date
Odds
Avg green
Avg red
Next day
23 July 2026
46% / 54%
+3.44%
−4.13%
One week
29 July 2026
43% / 57%
+6.11%
−6.11%
One month
21 August 2026
56% / 44%
+9.24%
−11.39%
Measured on IBM, 22 July 2026, from 28 comparable days.
Those magnitudes are large because the days that qualify are large. A reversal is by definition a session that moved a long way and turned, so the days around it tend to be eventful too. That is a property of the sample, not a forecast of drama.
Always read the averages next to the odds
The two average rows are one-sided: avg green averages only the up outcomes, avg red only the down outcomes. Never read them by themselves.
The month row shows why. The odds lean green at 56%, yet the average red (−11.39%) is larger than the average green (+9.24%). More of those months closed higher, but the ones that fell dropped harder. Looking only at the win rate would miss the size of the downside.
Chapter 4
The Three Charts
One Chart View toggle, three ways of looking at the same sample of comparable days: the Price Cone, the Bar Graph and the Chart Log.
1. Price Cone
The default. It projects forward 45 sessions from today's price, drawing the percentile bands of what the comparable days actually did, converted into prices.
Median line (50th percentile): the central outcome of the sample, not a target.
Cone width (10th to 90th): how much the comparable days disagreed. A narrow cone means consistent outcomes; a wide one means high variance.
2. Bar Graph
This asks a different question: how often did price travel a set distance, and how quickly? You choose the move size, and the chart answers in both directions at once. Green bars above the line show the share of comparable days that rose that far within a given number of days; red bars below show the share that fell that far.
By Touch vs By Close
Setting
What counts
Use it for
By Touch
Any intraday high or low that reached the level, even if price came back before the close
Path risk: stop-loss triggers or intraday margin
By Close
Only a daily close beyond the level
Settlement risk: holding-period targets or trend sustainability
Touch numbers are always equal to or higher than close numbers. A wide gap between the two flags heavy intraday movement that did not hold into the close.
3. Chart Log and the event register
The Chart Log shows the full price chart with every comparable day marked, so you can see the wider context each time the same setup appeared. Below it, the event register lists every comparable day with its date, its pivot, how far it reversed, and its forward return. On a tool that fires this rarely it is worth opening, because you can read the entire sample in one screen.
Any column sorts, which makes it easy to find the largest gains and worst drawdowns in the sample. Those extremes often matter more than the average when you are sizing a position.
The front page runs the same analysis across every ticker at once. Unlike most of this family it is usually a short list, because most days most stocks do not reverse.
The three price columns
Read left to right and they tell the day as a sequence:
Open, where the session started.
Pivot, the turning point, with how far it sat from the open.
Current price, with how far it has come back from that pivot.
The Reversal % column is that last figure on its own, and sorting it puts the sharpest turns at the top.
Price Projections
The same price projections from Chapter 3 appear here: avg green, avg red, and the odds, shown for next day, next week and next month.
Each figure is calculated from that ticker's own comparable days. The numbers are therefore not comparable side to side in the way they look. Two rows both showing 54% are each describing their own stock, and on this tool they may be describing very few days.