Absolute Breadth Index

by The trader, 5418 days ago

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The absolute breadth index, or ABI, is a market breadth indicator; it uses the number of advancing and declining stocks to measure the amount of volatility on US exchanges. This indicator does not take into account the price direction because it calculates the absolute value of the difference between the number of advancing stocks and the number of declining stocks. This result into a value that is always positive.

As with the Advance Decline Ratio, the absolute breadth index uses data provided by the Advance-Decline-Unchanged issues for NYSE, AMEX and NASDAQ item. It aggregates the number of advancing and declining stocks of three US exchanges: Amex, NASDAQ and NYSE. The Advance-Decline-Unchanged issues for NYSE, AMEX and NASDAQ is a downloader item that gets advance, decline and unchanged issues for the New York Stock Exchange, the American Stock Exchange and the NASDAQ. You should first download this data before using this composite.

The absolute breadth indicator was developed by Norman G. Fosback, in his "Stock Market Logic" book. Generally, high absolute breadth index values lead to higher volatility, which in turn results in higher stock prices moves in the weeks to come. Norman G. Fosback found out that historically, high values of this index lead to higher prices in the next three to twelve months.
Absolute breadth index's author suggests using a variation of the ABI that consists of dividing the weekly ABI by the total number of issues traded.

This variation as well as the absolute breadth index values should be smoothed with a moving average to facilitate the analysis and the interpretation of the data.
The absolute breadth index data is associated to the following symbol '_ABSOLUTE_BREADTH_INDEX'.