Volatility
What it measures¶
Volatility is how much a price moves from day to day. The tile measures it with the ATR(14) — the average true range over 14 sessions, where a session's true range is its high minus its low, widened to include any gap from the previous close — divided by the latest close, so it reads as a percentage: ATR%. It then places that reading among the share's own last 252 sessions (about a year) as a percentile: the 66th percentile means the share has moved more than this on only about a third of the past year's days.
Why it is on the page¶
How much a share moves matters for how much of it a person can reasonably own and how far a protective exit must sit from the price — the Technical page uses ATR for its stop levels. Volatility has no direction, though: large moves happen in rises and falls alike. So the tile describes and never votes.
Thresholds, their source and the population they were fitted on¶
The tile has no pass or fail and no verdict colour. Its bar is a neutral ramp from the quietest to the most active reading of the share's own year:
| Percentile | What it describes |
|---|---|
| low (near 0) | the share is moving less than on most days of its past year |
| middle | about as much as usual |
| high (near 100) | more than on most days of its past year |
- Source: J. Welles Wilder (1978) for ATR; ranking a reading against its own history in percentiles is the form options traders use for implied volatility, chosen because a single extreme day does not distort it.
- Fitted on: no population — a description of the share's own history.
- Evidence grade: not graded; volatility is described, not tested as a timing rule.
A worked example¶
On daily bars to 23 October 2026:
- Honeywell International — ATR(14) was 2.4% of the close: the 66th percentile of its own past year.
- Apple — 1.8%: the 12th percentile, a quiet stretch for that share.
What “No verdict” means here¶
The tile never has a verdict word; it has a reading or it does not. It needs 252 sessions for the percentile; with fewer, it shows the ATR% alone and says the percentile is not available. With fewer than 50 daily bars, the whole strip is withheld.
What the verdict is and is not¶
The reading describes how much the price has been moving against its own year. It is not a forecast of the next move or its direction and not an instruction to trade the shares.