Today's High

What Is Today's High?

Today's high refers to a security's intraday highest trading price. It is represented by the highest point on a day's candlestick chart.

This can be contrasted with today's low, or the trading day's intraday low price.

Understanding Today's High

Today's high is the highest price at which a stock traded during the course of the trading day and is typically higher than the closing or equal to the opening price. It may be used when calculating a moving average.

One way that day traders and technical analysts use today's high, along with today's low, is to help them identify gaps or sudden jumps up or down in a stock's price with no trading in between those two prices. For example, if today's low is $25 and the previous day's high is $20, there would be a gap. The identification of a gap, along with other market signals such as changes in trading volume and overall bullish or bearish sentiment, helps market analysts generate buy and sell signals for particular stocks.

Short-term traders, such as day traders, use intraday price movements and charts to determine the correct time to enter or exit a trade. Based upon this analysis, they implement trading strategies and capitalize on short-term price fluctuations.

Intraday strategies are also used to trade options. Option prices don’t change as quickly as underlying stock prices, so traders use intraday prices to identify periods when the option is mispriced relative to the stock. 

Intraday High and Day Trading

Intraday price movement is closely linked with day trading, the practice of buying and selling financial instruments within the same trading day. Many day traders are bankers or investment firm employees. However, since the advent of electronic trading, day trading has become increasingly popular with at-home traders.

There are numerous intraday strategies, which include scalping, where traders attempt to profit from incremental changes in price; range trading, which essentially uses support and resistance levels to determine buy and sell decisions; and news-based trading, which typically uses heightened volatility around news events that may create trading opportunities.

The biggest advantage of intraday trading is that positions are not affected by the possibility of negative overnight news that have the potential to materially impact the price of a security. Examples of potentially negative overnight news are key economic and earnings reports as well as broker upgrades and downgrades that occur, either before the market opens or after the market closes.

Trading on an intraday basis offers several other key advantages that include the ability to use tight stop-loss orders and access to increased leverage. Disadvantages of intraday trading include insufficient time for a position to increase in profit and increased commission costs due to trades being taken more frequently.

Intraday High Example

The price movements of any stock are posted throughout the trading day and summarized at the end of the trading day. For example, on April 2, 2019, shares of Apple Inc. (AAPL) opened at $191.09 and closed at $194.02. During the day, as indicated in the "day's range", shares dropped as low as $191.05 — the intraday low — and hit a peak of $194.46 — the intraday high (today's high).

Day traders and technical analysts who follow Apple would study the shares' moves, to see if they could discern any pattern or uncover any significant gap — that is, a sudden jump in the price with no trading in-between.