RVOL — Relative Volume
What it measures¶
Volume is the number of shares traded in a session. Relative volume divides the latest session's volume by the average volume of the previous 50 sessions: 1.0 is an ordinary day, 2.0 twice as busy as usual, 0.5 half as busy.
Why it is on the page¶
A price move on heavy volume has many participants behind it; one on light volume has few. The Technical page shows RVOL in the momentum panel. The Price & timing strip's Participation tile uses the same idea over five sessions instead of one, which smooths out a single unusual day.
Thresholds, their source and the population they were fitted on¶
The bar is logarithmic around 1.0 — so 0.5 and 2.0 sit equally far from the middle — clamped between 0.25 and 4:
| Zone | RVOL |
|---|---|
| quiet | 0.6 or less |
| normal | between 0.6 and 1.5 |
| heavy | 1.5 or more |
- Source: William O'Neil's commonly cited 1.4 to 1.5 times for a move with conviction; the high-volume return premium of Gervais, Kaniel and Mingelgrin (2001); the 0.6 line is the product's own.
- Fitted on: US shares (Gervais and colleagues), replicated in Australia, Warsaw and Vienna.
- Evidence grade: peer-reviewed and replicated (the effect); practitioner convention (the lines).
A worked example¶
An illustration, not a stored figure: a share that usually trades 2 million shares a day and traded 3.4 million today has an RVOL of 1.7 — heavy.
On the Price & timing strip, five-session volume against the prior 50 sessions read 1.12 for Honeywell International and 0.94 for Apple on 23 October 2026 — both normal.
What “No verdict” means here¶
RVOL carries no verdict and no vote. It reads insufficient data until 51 daily bars with volume are stored, and not applicable on a market that publishes no volume.
What the verdict is and is not¶
The figure describes how busy trading was. Volume alone does not say who traded or why, and a spike without a matching price move says little. It is not a forecast and not an instruction to trade the shares.