Methodology: how the RS rank works
How Global Stock Brief builds its daily Sector RS rank: the 129-ETF universe, the 1-month RS percentile, trend arrows, the RRG chart, alerts and the stock screen.
What is the Sector RS rank?
The Sector RS rank is a percentile score from 0 to 100 that shows where an ETF’s recent price performance sits relative to the other 128 funds in the universe. A rank of 99 means the fund beat about 99% of the group over the period measured. It measures relative position, not return. A fund can rise and still lose rank if the rest of the group rose more.
RS stands for relative strength. The headline figure in every brief is the 1-month RS rank, printed as “RS Rank 1M” in the tables. The published numbers come from an internal spreadsheet called the “Sector RS (US)” sheet, which is updated once after each US close. The briefs sometimes call it “the sheet” to distinguish the official rank from the faster price-based lines on the 45-day chart.
A rough reading guide:
| RS rank | Position in the group | How to read it |
|---|---|---|
| 90 to 100 | Top 10% | Clear leadership over the period |
| 70 to 89 | Upper tier | Participating in the leading flow |
| Around 50 | Middle | Keeping pace with the group |
| 30 and below | Lower tier | Money is somewhere else |
The explainer Why Leaders Keep Leading: Reading Sector Rotation Through RS and RRG covers the idea behind relative strength at more length. This page covers how the numbers are produced.
Which ETFs are in the 129-ETF universe?
The universe is 129 US-listed exchange-traded funds chosen to cover the 11 S&P 500 sectors through the Select Sector SPDRs, the main industries inside them, and the themes that attract money in their own right: semiconductors, cybersecurity, cloud software, oil producers and oil services, gold and silver miners, uranium, crypto-linked stocks, biotech and genomics, defense, and others.
Examples that appear often in the briefs: the sector SPDRs (XLE, XLF, XLV and the other eight), iShares Semiconductor (SOXX), Global X Cybersecurity (BUG), iShares Cybersecurity and Tech (IHAK), WisdomTree Cloud Computing (WCLD), iShares Expanded Tech-Software (IGV), iShares U.S. Oil & Gas E&P (IEO), SPDR S&P Oil & Gas E&P (XOP), First Trust Natural Gas (FCG), VanEck Oil Services (OIH), VanEck Gold Miners (GDX), Global X Silver Miners (SIL), Global X Uranium (URA), SPDR S&P Biotech (XBI), iShares Aerospace & Defense (ITA), United States Oil Fund (USO), and theme funds such as Roundhill Meme Stock (MEME) and ARK Autonomous Technology & Robotics (ARKQ).
Broad index, style and size funds such as the Russell 1000 Growth and Value funds (IWF, IWD), the equal-weight S&P 500 fund (RSP) and the Russell 2000 fund (IWM) are quoted in the market summary.
Several funds overlap. BUG and IHAK both hold cybersecurity stocks, GDX and GDXJ both hold gold miners, and XOP and IEO both hold oil producers. When a theme is strong, it can fill more than one of the top five seats. That is a feature of the universe, not a signal on its own.
How is the 1-month RS rank calculated?
After each US close, every fund’s price change over the trailing one month is computed from Yahoo Finance closing prices. The 129 results are sorted and each fund receives its percentile position, rounded to a whole number from 0 to 100.
Because the window is a full month, the rank reacts slowly to a sudden break. A fund that drops 11% in a week can still read 99 for several sessions, which the briefs point out when it happens (“the 1-month rank still reads 99 because the sheet looks back a full month”). That lag is why every table shows the 1-Day move and the three trend arrows next to the rank. Read the three together, not the rank alone.
The 45-day trend chart in each brief is built from a separate, faster calculation. Its lines are price-based and move ahead of the sheet rank, so a fund can read 62 on the chart while the sheet still ranks it 99. The sheet is the official rank and the chart is the early-warning view.
For individual stocks, the same percentile idea is applied to the roughly 1,130 to 1,190 stocks held by the universe’s ETFs, over three windows: RS 1D (one session), RS 5D (five sessions) and RS 1M (one month). The “1M Return” column next to them is the plain one-month price change, so readers can see the rank and the return side by side.
What do the trend arrows mean?
The three trend columns, Short-Term, Mid-Term and Long-Term, compare a fund’s latest close with its 1-month, 1-quarter and 1-year moving averages. 🔺 means the price is above that average, and 🔽 means it is below. Three up arrows, written ▲▲▲ in the stock screen, mean the price is above all three averages, which the briefs call full alignment. Three down arrows mean it is below all three.
The arrows describe the condition of the move, not its strength. A high rank with three 🔽 arrows is usually a fund that led a month ago and is now breaking down. A low rank with three 🔺 arrows is usually a fund that is early in a turn.
What is the RRG v2 chart?
The RRG, or Relative Rotation Graph, plots each of the 129 funds as one point. The horizontal axis is relative strength against the broad market, and the vertical axis is the momentum of that relative strength. The chart has four quadrants: Leading (top right), Weakening (bottom right), Lagging (bottom left) and Improving (top left). Funds tend to travel through them clockwise. “v2” marks the current, second version of the chart.
| Quadrant | Relative condition | Typical reading |
|---|---|---|
| Improving | Still weak, gaining momentum | Money may be starting to rotate in |
| Leading | Strong with positive momentum | Leadership established |
| Weakening | Still strong, losing momentum | Leadership may be fading |
| Lagging | Weak with negative momentum | Money is focused elsewhere |
The quadrant matters, but the direction of travel matters more. A fund can sit in Leading while already curling toward Weakening, as the gold miners did on August 31, 2026, when they held ranks of 99 to 100 and fell about 5% in one session. The Relative Rotation Graph format was created by analyst Julius de Kempenaer. The chart on this site is Global Stock Brief’s own implementation of the idea.
How are the Breakdown Warnings and Rebound Signals triggered?
Both alerts measure the change in a fund’s 1-month RS rank over the last five sessions. A Breakdown Warning lists the funds whose rank fell the most, with start and end rank, for example “from 91 to 5”. A Rebound Signal lists the funds whose rank rose the most from a low base. An alert is printed only when the sheet rank confirms it.
The confirmation rule matters. The faster five-day calculation sometimes shows bigger moves than the sheet does, and when the two disagree the fund is left out and the brief says so. The alerts are meant to flag turns before they are lost in the daily noise: a move from rank 30 to 70 says more about where money is going than another day at rank 100 does.
How are the three stocks selected each day?
The stock pool is every holding of the 129 ETFs, about 1,130 to 1,190 stocks depending on the day. A stock qualifies when its RS percentile is at least 60 over one day, 75 over five days and 85 over one month, and its price is above its 1-month, 1-quarter and 1-year moving averages (▲▲▲). From the stocks that pass, the brief writes up three.
In plain words, the screen asks for a stock in the top 40% today, the top 25% this week, the top 15% this month, with the trend aligned on all three horizons. One strong session is not enough. The Selection line in each brief prints the day’s pool size and the rule, and the “Held By” column lists the universe ETFs that hold the stock, so a name held by three energy funds and a name held by one theme fund can be told apart.
Each selected stock then gets the same treatment: the day’s move and the five-day move, the distance from its one-year closing high, the latest quarter’s revenue, operating income and earnings per share from the 10-Q or the earnings release, any dated company event from its filings, and any analyst action reported that day, attributed to the firm that made it. The screen looks only at price and trend; valuation and the rest are considered in the write-up, after the fact.
What are the checkpoints and the scorecard?
A checkpoint is a specific price that the next few sessions can be judged against, usually the stock’s prior closing high or the close that preceded its latest move. It is not a target and not a stop. The next brief measures each of the previous brief’s three stocks from that brief’s close to the latest close, prints the S&P 500 return over the same span, and says which beat the index. The line ends “Recorded as is.”
The scorecard covers one session when briefs run on consecutive trading days, and the full span since the last brief when days were skipped; the brief states the dates either way. It is a record of how the screen’s output behaved, not a portfolio return. It ignores trading costs, taxes and position sizing, and losing picks are printed with the same prominence as winning ones.
When is the data captured and when does the brief publish?
All prices are official closing prices for the US session, 4:00 p.m. Eastern Time, from Yahoo Finance. The RS sheet, trend arrows, RRG and the stock screen are run once after that close. The brief is written and published the following morning in Korea Standard Time, typically around 8 a.m. KST, so a brief posted on October 17 KST describes the October 16 US session. Calendar times inside the briefs are given in KST.
The date in each table’s Basis line is the US trading date, not the posting date. If a data vendor revises a close after publication, the brief is not rewritten; the next brief uses the revised data.
How has the ETF universe changed?
The universe is edited in steps, and the number of funds appears in every brief, so changes are visible in the archive. Briefs for the August 31 and September 1, 2026 sessions refer to 124 ETFs in the stock-screen line, briefs for September 3 and 4 count 127 in the breadth line, and from the September 11 session onward every brief uses 129. Future changes will be logged on this page with the date, the fund and the reason.
Rules for changes: a fund is added when it covers a sector or theme the universe was missing, and removed when it closes or stops being a useful proxy. New funds are ranked from their own price history. When a fund is removed, past briefs are not edited and earlier ranks are not recomputed. The RRG is always drawn on the current universe.
What are the limits of this method?
Relative strength is a description of past prices inside a fixed universe, produced by one person from one price vendor. It lags by design, it ignores fundamentals, and its scorecard is not a strategy return. The points below are the ones that most often lead readers to over-read a rank, and each brief is written with them in mind.
- RS describes, it does not predict. A rank is a record of past relative performance over a fixed window.
- The one-month window lags. Sharp breaks show up in the 1-Day column and the arrows before they show up in the rank.
- Rank is relative. On a day when 91 of 129 funds fell, the fund ranked 99 may have fallen too.
- Overlapping funds can fill several top seats with one theme.
- The choice of universe drives the results. A fund that is not one of the 129 cannot rank, and a theme without a fund is invisible here.
- Price data come from one vendor and are not audited. Holdings files used for the stock pool can lag the fund’s actual portfolio.
- The stock screen looks only at price. It does not consider valuation, earnings quality, liquidity or news, and the three stocks are a research starting point, not a portfolio.
- The scorecard measures one session or the span between briefs, with no costs, no sizing and no compounding. It is not a backtest.
- Ranks are rounded to whole numbers, and the RS sheet is a spreadsheet maintained by one person. Errors are possible, and the correction policy on the About page applies.
Related pages: About this site · Disclaimer · Sector RS Rank archive