What Is the 52-Week Range?

The 52-week range is a data point traditionally reported by printed financial news media, but more modernly included in data feeds from financial information sources online. The data point includes the lowest and highest price at which a stock has traded during the previous 52 weeks.

Investors use this information as a proxy for how much fluctuation and risk they may have to endure over the course of a year should they choose to invest in a given stock. Investors can find a stock’s 52-week range in a stock’s quote summary provided by a broker or financial information website. The visual representation of this data can be observed on a price chart that displays one year’s worth of price data.

Understanding the 52-Week Range

The 52-week range can be a single data point of two numbers: the highest and lowest price for the previous year. But there is much more to the story than these two numbers alone. Visualizing the data in a chart to show the price action for the entire year can provide a much better context for how these numbers are generated.

Since price movement is not always balanced and rarely symmetrical, it is important for an investor to know which number was more recent, the high or the low. Usually an investor will assume the number closest to the current price is the most recent one, but this is not always the case, and not knowing the correct information can make for costly investment decisions.

Two examples of the 52-week range in the following chart show how useful it might be to compare the high and low prices with the larger picture of the price data over the past year.

These examples show virtually the same high and low data points for a 52-week range (set 1 marked in blue lines) and a trend that seems to indicate a short-term downward move ahead.

The overlapping range on the same stock (set 2 marked in red lines) now seems to imply that an upward move may be following at least in the short term. Both of these trends can be seen to play out as expected (though such outcomes are never certain). Technical analysts compare a stock’s current trading price and its recent trend to its 52-week range to get a broad sense of how the stock is performing relative to the past 12 months. They also look to see how much the stock’s price has fluctuated, and whether such fluctuation is likely to continue or even increase.

The information from the high and low data points may indicate the potential future range of the stock and how volatile its price is, but only the trend and relative strength studies can help a trader or analyst understand the context of those two data points. Most financial websites that quote a stock’s share price also quote its 52-week range. Sites like Yahoo Finance, Finviz.com and StockCharts.com allow investors to scan for stocks trading at their 12-month high or low.

Current Price Relative to 52-Week Range

To calculate where a stock is currently trading at in relations to its 52-week high and low, consider the following example:

Suppose over the last year that a stock has traded as high as $100, as low as $50 and is currently trading at $70. This means the stock is trading 30% below its 52-week high (1-(70/100) = 0.30 or 30%) and 40% above its 52-week low ((70/50) – 1 = 0.40 or 40%). These calculations take the difference between the current price and the high or low price over the past 12 months and then convert them to percentages.

52-Week Range Trading Strategies

Investors can use a breakout strategy and buy a stock when it trades above its 52-week range, or open a short position when it trades below it. Aggressive traders could place a stop-limit order slightly above or below the 52-week trade to catch the initial breakout. Price often retraces back to the breakout level before resuming its trend; therefore, traders who want to take a more conservative approach may want to wait for a retracement before entering the market to avoid chasing the breakout.

Volume should be steadily increasing when a stock’s price nears the high or low of its 12-month range to show the issue has enough participation to break out to a new level. Trades could use indicators like the on-balance volume (OBV) to track rising volume. The breakout should ideally trade above or below a psychological number also, such as $50 or $100, to help gain the attention of institutional investors.

What is an Aggressive Investment Strategy?

An aggressive investment strategy typically refers to a style of portfolio management that attempts to maximize returns by taking a relatively higher degree of risk. Strategies for achieving higher than average returns typically emphasize capital appreciation as a primary investment objective, rather than income or safety of principal. Such a strategy would therefore have an asset allocation with a substantial weighting in stocks and possibly little or no allocation to bonds or cash.

Aggressive investment strategies are typically thought to be suitable for young adults with smaller portfolio sizes. Because a lengthy investment horizon enables them to ride out market fluctuations, and losses early in one’s career have less impact than later, investment advisors do not consider this strategy suitable for anyone else but young adults unless such a strategy is applied to only a small portion of one’s nest-egg savings. Regardless of the investor’s age, however, a high tolerance for risk is an absolute prerequisite for an aggressive investment strategy.

Understanding Aggressive Investment Strategy

The aggressiveness of an investment strategy depends on the relative weight of high-reward, high-risk asset classes, such as equities and commodities, within the portfolio.

For example, Portfolio A which has an asset allocation of 75% equities, 15% fixed income, and 10% commodities would be considered quite aggressive, since 85% of the portfolio is weighted to equities and commodities. However, it would still be less aggressive than Portfolio B, which has an asset allocation of 85% equities and 15% commodities.

Even within the equity component of an aggressive portfolio, the composition of stocks can have a significant bearing on its risk profile. For instance, if the equity component only consists of blue-chip stocks, it would be considered less risky than if the portfolio only held small-capitalization stocks. If this is the case in the earlier example, Portfolio B could arguably be considered less aggressive than Portfolio A, even though it has 100% of its weight in aggressive assets.

Yet another aspect of an aggressive investment strategy has to do with allocation. A strategy that simply divided all available money equally into 20 different stocks could be a very aggressive strategy, but dividing all money equally into just 5 different stocks would be more aggressive still.

Aggressive Investment strategies may also include a high turnover strategy, seeking to chase stocks that show high relative performance in a short time period. The high turnover may create higher returns, but could also drive higher transaction costs, thus increasing the risk of poor performance.

Aggressive Investment Strategy and Active Management

An aggressive strategy needs more active management than a conservative “buy-and-hold” strategy, since it is likely to be much more volatile and could require frequent adjustments, depending on market conditions. More rebalancing would also be required to bring portfolio allocations back to their target levels. Volatility of the assets could lead allocations to deviate significantly from their original weights. This extra work also drives higher fees as the portfolio manager may require more staff to manage all such positions.

Recent years have seen significant pushback against active investing strategies. Many investors have pulled their assets out of hedge funds, for example, due to those managers’ underperformance. Instead, some have chosen to place their money with passive managers. These managers adhere to investing styles that often employ managing index funds for strategic rotation. In these cases, portfolios often mirror a market index, such as the S&P 500.