Key takeaways · 5
- RS Rating is a percentile: it ranks a stock’s strength against the whole universe from 1 to 99. By construction the top is always full. The strongest name always scores 99 and the leaders cluster just beneath it, whether the market is ripping or falling apart.
- Power is an absolute measurement on a fixed 1-99 scale. It takes the stock’s own front-weighted 12-month return and scores it against a benchmark that was set once from the whole universe and then frozen, never re-fit to today’s field. Its top is scarce: in a weak tape, almost no name scores 99.
- The two answer different questions. RS asks "how does this stock rank against everything else right now." Power asks "how strong is this stock in absolute terms, against a fixed yardstick that does not move with today’s market."
- Classical RS is a third number: the IBD-style rating, also a percentile of a weighted trailing return. Like RS Rating it is relative, so it shares the always-full-top property.
- In the terminal,
rsis the percentile andpwris Power.leaders pwrranks by Power;leaders pwr fulluncaps the list. Reading them together is the point: strong-and-scarce beats strong-but-only-relatively.
Two numbers that both say “strong”
tickerstance shows a stock more than one strength number, and they can disagree sharply. A name can carry an RS Rating of 95 and a Power of 40 on the same afternoon. Neither is wrong. They are built from different questions, and the gap between them is often the most useful thing on the row.
Both land on a 1-to-99 scale, which is what makes the confusion possible. The scale is borrowed from the IBD RS Rating that swing traders already know, where 99 means "top of the pack." But only one of tickerstance’s two numbers works that way. The other uses the same 1-99 range to mean something entirely different, and telling them apart is the whole point of this page.
The short version: RS Rating is a rank, and Power is a measurement. A rank sorts every stock against every other stock and hands out places. A measurement holds each stock up against a fixed yardstick and reports what it reads, without caring where anything else landed.
RS Rating is uniform by construction: the top 1% is always occupied. Power is an absolute scale whose top empties when few names are genuinely strong.
Relative strength is a rank
The RS Rating is a percentile. tickerstance measures each stock’s trailing performance, sorts the whole eligible universe from strongest to weakest, and turns the position into a 1-99 score: the top name scores 99, the bottom scores 1, and everything else falls in between. This is the same idea as the IBD RS Rating that O’Neil’s CAN SLIM popularised.
The defining property of a percentile is that it is uniform. The top of the sort always scores 99, and the same thin sliver of names crowds the high 90s every single day, because the score is nothing but position in the ranking. That is a feature when you want a clean cross-sectional ranking: it is directly comparable across days, and a 90 always means the same thing relative to the field. It is also a limitation. In a brutal bear market, the strongest names still crowd the top of the scale even if every one of them is down for the year, because the rank only knows relative order, not absolute health.
So a high RS Rating is a real signal, but a specific one. It says the stock is beating most of the market. It does not say the stock is going up. In a broad decline, the RS leaders are often the names falling least, and the rating cannot tell that story on its own.
Power is a measurement
Power was built to answer the question the percentile cannot: how strong is this stock in absolute terms, measured against a fixed benchmark rather than against today’s field. It is a measurement on a frozen scale, not a ranking.
The input is the stock’s own front-weighted 12-month return, computed so the most recent stretch counts most: about 40% weight on the last three months, the rest split across the six-, nine-, and twelve-month windows. That absolute return is winsorised to tame the extreme tail, standardised against a fixed benchmark, and squashed through a statistical curve into a 1-99 number. The benchmark is the load-bearing part. It was calibrated once from a past snapshot of the whole universe and then frozen, so it never re-ranks against today’s field the way a percentile does. That frozen scale is what makes Power absolute rather than relative.
The consequence is a scarce top. Because the yardstick never re-fits to the current field, a Power of 99 means the stock is a long way above the frozen baseline in raw return terms, not merely ahead of its peers. On the day the anchors were set, about half a percent of the universe reached 99. In a broad advance that number swells; in a weak tape it collapses toward zero. The top of Power breathes with the real strength of the market, which is exactly what a percentile can never do.
Why the top has to be allowed to empty
Picture a grinding bear market where the average stock is down 25% on the year and the best-performing names are merely flat. Sort that universe by trailing return and the top 1% still scores 99 on RS Rating, because a rank always fills its top. A screen for "RS above 95" hands you a list of names that are beating the market and going nowhere.
Power reads the same tape differently. Those flat leaders are strong relative to their peers but ordinary against the frozen benchmark, so they land in the middle of the Power scale, not the top. A screen for "Power above 90" comes back nearly empty, which is the honest answer: in that market, almost nothing is strong in absolute terms. The empty screen is information, and reading it as a malfunction is the mistake.
Now flip to a broad advance where leaders are up 80% and even the median stock is green. RS Rating looks identical to the bear case at the top: the same thin band crowds 99. Power fills up, with a wide spread of names reading 90 and above, because a lot of stocks now clear the fixed bar by a distance. Run the two side by side and the disagreement itself becomes the read: strong-and-scarce is a different, better condition than strong-but-only-relatively.
Where Classical RS fits
There is a third strength number in the terminal, and it belongs on the relative side of the ledger. Classical RS is the IBD-style rating: a percentile of a weighted trailing return, front-loaded toward recent quarters in the classic O’Neil manner. tickerstance keeps it because it is the number a generation of CAN SLIM traders learned to read, and it lines up with what they see in IBD’s own tables.
Because Classical RS is a percentile, it shares RS Rating’s always-full-top property. The two differ mainly in the exact return window and weighting, not in kind. If RS Rating and Classical RS disagree on a name, the disagreement is about which trailing window it is strong in, not about relative-versus-absolute. For the relative-versus-absolute question, the pair that matters is RS and Power.
Where each number misleads
RS Rating misleads when you forget it is relative. A 99 in a falling market is a rank, not a green light. Pair it with an absolute read (Power, or simply the stock’s distance from its own highs) before trusting that "strongest in the market" also means "actually going up."
Power misleads in the opposite direction. Because its anchors are frozen and calibrated on history, a long, unusual regime can leave the whole scale reading a little high or a little low until the next recalibration. It also needs a full year of history to compute a 12-month return, so the newest names show no Power at all, even when they are clearly leading. And a very high Power describes a large move already made; like any trailing strength number, it says more about the past than the next month.
Neither is a substitute for the other, and neither is a substitute for the chart. They are two lenses on strength: one tells you where a stock ranks, the other tells you how strong it is in absolute terms. The names worth the most attention tend to read well on both at once.
How tickerstance uses them
On the leaderboards and in the terminal, rs is the percentile RS Rating and pwr is Power, shown under distinct labels on purpose so the two are never confused. The multi-horizon RS columns (1-month, 3-month, 6-month, 1-year) are all percentiles; Power is the single absolute companion.
leaders ranks by RS Rating by default. leaders pwr re-ranks the same names by Power, and leaders pwr full uncaps the list so you can see how far down the Power scale still reads strong: a short list in a weak tape, a long one in a broad rip. leaders classical swaps in the IBD-style percentile. Any of these composes with the momentum screens and filters, so dt pwr>90 finds Double Trouble names that are also strong in absolute terms.
Neither number feeds Stance; both are per-stock reads. Stance sizes up the market, RS and Power size up individual names, and the habit worth keeping is to read the two as a pair: RS says the stock is winning its race, Power says whether the race is worth winning right now.
Frequently asked questions
What is the difference between RS Rating and Power?
RS Rating is a percentile: it ranks a stock’s trailing strength against the whole universe, so the top of the field always scores 99 regardless of market conditions. Power is an absolute measurement on a fixed 1-99 scale, built from the stock’s own front-weighted 12-month return scored against a benchmark that was calibrated once from the universe and then frozen. Power’s top is scarce: nearly empty in a weak tape, full in a broad advance.
What does a Power rating of 99 mean?
That the stock’s absolute trailing return is a long way above the frozen benchmark, not merely ahead of its peers. Because Power’s yardstick is fixed rather than re-ranked each day, a 99 is rare: on the day the anchors were calibrated, about half a percent of the universe reached it, and that count shrinks toward zero when few names are strong. Power is not a percentile, so 99 does not mean "beat 99% of stocks."
Why does a stock have a high RS Rating but a low Power?
Because it is strong relative to the market but not strong in absolute terms. This is the classic weak-tape case: in a decline, the best-performing names are often flat or down slightly, so they still rank in the top percentiles (high RS) while sitting only around the frozen benchmark (middling Power). The gap is telling you the stock is winning a race that is not going anywhere.
Is Power a percentile?
No, and that is the whole point. A percentile re-ranks the field every day, so its top is always full. Power maps an absolute strength value through a fixed curve calibrated once against history, so its top is allowed to empty. That is why Power is displayed under its own label and never called an "RS Rating."
What is Classical RS?
The IBD-style RS rating: a percentile of a weighted trailing return, front-loaded toward the most recent quarters in the O’Neil manner. It is relative, like RS Rating, so its top is always full. It exists because it is the number CAN SLIM traders already know from IBD’s tables. For the relative-versus-absolute distinction, compare RS and Power, not RS and Classical.
Which strength number should I use?
Both, together. RS Rating tells you where a stock ranks against the market; Power tells you how strong it is against a fixed benchmark. A name that reads well on both is strong in a way that survives the market getting hard. In a weak tape especially, Power is the honest check on a high RS: if Power is empty across your list, the RS leaders are just the least-bad names.
How do I see RS and Power on tickerstance?
They appear as the rs and pwr columns on the leaderboards and in the terminal. leaders ranks by RS Rating; leaders pwr re-ranks by Power; leaders pwr full uncaps the Power-ranked list; leaders classical uses the IBD-style percentile. Combine with any screen, for example dt pwr>90 for Double Trouble names that are also strong in absolute terms.