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What it measures

Three things that are already true at the moment you look: how far this entry sits from the stock’s own recent prices, how far it would have to fall to reach a band where it actually traded, and what the round trip costs. All of it is arithmetic on two years of daily opens, highs, lows, closes and volume.

The nine measures

Stretch

How far above its own moving average it trades, in units of its own daily range — then read against its own two-year distribution of that same quantity. Eight per cent above the 50-day is nothing on a stock that moves six per cent a day and a great deal on one that moves one.

Position

Where in its own range this sits, and what share of the window’s volume changed hands below the price you would pay. The second half is the point: it counts how many holders are already in profit above their cost.

Heat

What the last few sessions added. The overbought family — RSI, stochastic, Williams %R, CCI, money flow — is five ways of asking one question, so they are each read against their own history and reduced to a single median rather than counted five times.

Room

The last N sessions binned by price into a volume shelf; the distance down to the nearest band that holds a real share of that volume, in per cent. A level where the stock genuinely changed hands, not one where it merely turned round once.

Volatility

Realised volatility from log returns, annualised, read against its own two-year range — and scaled to the window as a one-sigma move. Quoted as a range, because the estimate has a standard error of its own.

Friction

The only cost here that is certain. Dollar volume and how coarse one tick is against the price. The quoted spread is not in this feed, so it is not estimated — inferring it from the intraday range would be measuring volatility and calling it cost.

Locked out

The share of this stock’s movement that happens between the close and the next open, while the book you would trade in is shut — and, when it gaps up, how often the session hands it back before the bell. A name that makes most of its price overnight is one you cannot time an entry into and cannot exit when it moves. The two readings combine by taking the higher, never by adding: they correlate about 0.5, and adding them would let one fact vote twice.

Effort

How many shares it has taken lately to move this price up one per cent, against how many to move it down one. A high reading means every rise is being bought through supply while the falls need almost no selling — the expensive side to be entering on. The window’s own drift is removed before the comparison, because without that step the statistic simply reads the trend back to you as depth. This is a reading about the state of the tape over recent months and not a property of the company: it correlates only 0.13 with itself across separate windows. It is also not a liquidity measure — this feed carries no quote, no spread and no depth.

Passenger

The share of this stock’s daily movement that is simply its own sector index moving, fitted against the matching sector fund. A high reading says most of what you are buying is a basket that trades in its own wrapper, usually more cheaply. It drops, by name, for anything with no sector on the register — there is deliberately no fallback to the broad market, because that fallback caught a third of the names in testing and produced every wrong answer in the set.

Where it refuses

A window with too little history returns no score rather than a number with a caveat. Seven days needs 120 sessions, thirty needs 160, ninety needs 260 — below that, the measures have no distribution to be read against.

A window also returns no score when too little of it answered. The test is coverage, not a count: if fewer than 70 of the 100 points of weight could be computed, there is no number. This replaced a rule that counted dropped measures, which stopped working the moment there were nine of them — an exchange-traded fund has no sector to be a passenger of, so a plain index lookup would have been refused for missing one input out of nine. Under the coverage rule a fund leaves 90 to 97 points and scores correctly; a listing with no volume at all leaves 60 to 69 and is refused, also correctly.

A plausible-looking number standing in for absent data is the one thing this page is built not to do.

What it is not

• Not a probability. A reading of 80 does not mean an eighty per cent chance of losing money. It means every measure here sits at the expensive end of its own range.
• Not a forecast. Nothing here states or implies what the price does next.
• Not a valuation. It does not know what the business is worth. It has no earnings.
• Not a judgement of the company. An excellent business can read 90. The reading is about the price and the window.
• Not fitted. No number in the weight table was chosen by testing which value would have made money. The weights are a stated opinion about how long each measure takes to matter, and they are printed in the tally so you can disagree with them.
• Not advice. This page does not know your position size, your cost basis, your other holdings or your actual fill, and it never tells you what to do.

One technical note worth keeping honest

Stretch, heat and volatility are computed on split- and dividend-adjusted closes, which is a total-return series — while what you actually pay is a price. On most names the difference is immaterial; on a high-yielding one it is real. The price shown at the top of the reading is the raw last print, not the adjusted one.