Glossary
52-Week Range
The highest and the lowest price a stock has traded at over the past year, printed as a pair.
A price on its own says very little. Knowing a share costs $112 tells you nothing about the company, because a share price is just the company's value cut into however many slices it happens to have. The 52-week range is the cheapest context available for that number: it shows you where today sits against everywhere the stock has been in the last twelve months.
The two figures are simply the extremes. If the range reads $80 to $140, the stock changed hands at $80 on some day in the past year and at $140 on some other day, and at most prices in between along the way.
What the range does not carry is any reason. A stock near the bottom of its range might be there because the business shrank, because the whole market fell, or because one quarter came in below what people expected. A stock near the top might be there for reasons just as varied. The range records prices; the rest of a company page is where the reasons live.
Learn this properly
Lesson 7: How to Read a Stock PageA walkthrough of the ConvictionStocks stock page layout and what each section tells you about a company.
See it on a real company
GOOGL shows this figure on its pageWe label it "52-Week Range", and Wall Street calls it "52-Week Range". The page is open to everyone, no account needed.
Related terms
- VolumeHow many shares changed hands over a period, usually reported as the total traded during a single day.
- Moving AverageThe average closing price over a fixed number of recent days, recalculated daily so it moves along with the price.
- BetaA measure of how much a stock has moved relative to the market, where 1.0 means it moved roughly in step.
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