Relative volume (RVOL) explained: unusual volume, and how to use it
Relative volume answers one question: is this bar trading more than usual? This guide is how SixOne8 works out "usual", what the settings change, and the comparisons you can build a condition from. It needs trading volume, which US stocks and ETFs carry — coming soon on Elite — and the forex and crypto feeds do not.
What relative volume measures
RVOL is the bar's volume divided by the average volume of the N bars before it. The bar being measured is not part of its own average, so a single heavy bar cannot dilute the comparison it is judged by. The result is a plain multiple: 1 is an ordinary bar, 2 is twice the recent average, 0.5 is half of it.
That makes it the most direct way to write "volume picked up" as a condition. Chartists look for it on breakouts, on gaps and around news, on the reasoning that a move with more trading behind it involved more participants. Whether that reasoning held on a particular market is something to test rather than assume.
RVOL settings
- Period. How many previous bars make the average, twenty by default. A longer period gives a steadier baseline that one busy week cannot move much.
- Threshold. The multiple the condition compares against, 1.5 by default.
If the previous bars carry no volume at all, there is nothing to divide by, and RVOL gives no reading for that bar rather than a misleading zero. A strategy using RVOL applies only to markets with volume, and a bar that arrives without its volume gives no reading either.
How to use relative volume in a strategy
These are the comparisons SixOne8 offers for RVOL, in the builder's own words.
- Greater than a level. True on a bar whose volume is more than that multiple of the recent average. Volume is a per-bar figure, so this is already a moment: it is true on the heavy bar and usually false again on the next one.
- Less than a level. True on a bar trading below that multiple — "a quiet bar", for a strategy that wants to avoid busy conditions or wait for them to settle.
RVOL(20) on 15m · greater than · 2
Read it as a sentence: on the 15-minute chart, this bar traded more than twice the average of the previous twenty bars. That is what the scanner evaluates at each 15-minute close, and what the alert will say if it is the condition that completed the strategy.
Relative volume and the time of day
On intraday charts, US stocks trade far more in the first and last half hour of the session than in the middle of the day. RVOL compares a bar with the bars immediately before it, not with the same time on previous days, so the opening bars often read high simply because they are the open, and midday bars often read low. On the 5-minute chart, the first bar's twenty predecessors are the end of the previous session.
Two ways to live with that: read RVOL on the daily chart, where each bar is a whole session compared with recent sessions; or pair it with a time condition so it only counts outside the open. Paired with a price condition — a close above an opening range or a Donchian Channel — RVOL is the part that asks whether the move came with unusual trading behind it.
Does relative volume work on your market?
Run an entry check. It will tell you whether, on the stock or ETF you care about, the moments this condition fired moved any differently from a random moment over the history tested. That is a fact about the past on that market, and it is the only kind of fact a test here produces.