Absolute Breadth Index - ABI

There is an absolute breath index, but usually Life Savers mints take care of that pretty quickly. This is the Absolute Breadth Index, or ABI, which is something completely different. The "breadth" here refers to how broadly a given market move is running. Doesn't matter whether the prices are going up or down, the notion simply refers to whether its only one stock that is a large element of a given index (like Apple in a tech index) which has declined...or whether more or less all of the stocks on a given day have declined because China just entered the market with a better phone stolen from American ideas at half the price. The calculation? Easy. It's just the absolute value of the difference between the number of advancing issues and declining issues.

Related or Semi-related Video

Finance: What is the Historical Trading ...18 Views

00:00

Finance, a la shmoop. What is a historical trading range? All right you know how [The question written on a blackboard]

00:07

some Wall Street words are arcane, uh no arcane.. they say one thing but they mean [Pong being played]

00:14

something entirely different? Yeah well this is not one of those times.

00:18

Historical trading range, darn well you could say that AT&T has had a historical [AT&T tower]

00:23

trading range at a given price largely because well here's its stock chart for

00:27

the last umpteen years and you can see that it hasn't really moved sort of [AT&T showing a fairly consistent price over time]

00:31

lived between 30 and 40 bucks a share more or less forever it seems all the

00:35

investment gains to AT&T shareholders came through the company paying massive [Definition of dividend written on a 100 dollar bill]

00:39

dividends but historical ranges aren't just about stock prices alone like

00:44

here's the historical trading range of the price to earnings ratio of the S&P

00:49

500 so this chart shows the range of p/e multiples from 1880 to today ish and [Arrows showing the date range on the graph]

00:55

note that the lion's share of multiples lived in this band from about ten times [Lion's head appears]

00:59

to about 20 times and this was the range of multiples in yes there were outliers

01:04

like down here in the dumps after the economic hangover post-world War two [Man welding in a workshop]

01:08

repair work and then up here as well where earnings were actually very low

01:12

like one-time low so the price to earnings ratio was very high right like [Arrow pointing to the highest peak on the graph]

01:17

all the companies missed their numbers horribly went negative and stuff

01:20

all right like the company used to trade for 20 bucks a share and earned a dollar

01:24

well it might have had in that short period only a dime of earnings when

01:27

everything went bad and the world was ending but the stock went down 40 percent to [Picture of a city on fire]

01:31

12 bucks and on a dime of earnings while that 12 bucks seemed like a huge

01:35

multiple at 120 times but Wall Street knew the world wasn't ending and things

01:39

did come back and well here we are doing this video, so the short lived things get

01:42

tossed out and when you look at ranges you look at their history not just one [Bag labelled 2008 recession is chucked out the door of a house]

01:46

moment in time but decades in the past and you think about the ranges and what [Highlighted area on the graph going further back in time]

01:51

it implies in the future if anything and when in doubt yes you just sing Oh home

01:57

on the range, where the price to earnings ratio [Girl sat next to a fire with a guitar singing]

02:01

plays, or something like that historical trading range that's what it

02:05

is go check it out...

Find other enlightening terms in Shmoop Finance Genius Bar(f)