New Highs/New Lows
New highs and new lows are daily breadth statistics that count the number of stocks on a given exchange reaching their highest or lowest price in the past 52 weeks, used as a market health indicator by tracking the momentum of individual securities at the extremes.
The new highs/new lows (NH/NL) statistic is published each trading day by exchanges and financial data services, showing how many stocks closed at their highest 52-week price (new highs) versus their lowest 52-week price (new lows). This data point provides a snapshot of market momentum at the individual security level — one of the most direct measures of whether strength or weakness is truly broad.
During a healthy bull market, new highs on the NYSE or NASDAQ consistently outnumber new lows by wide margins. In a strong market environment, it is not unusual to see 300, 400, or even 500 new highs in a single session against only 20 or 30 new lows. This imbalance reflects that individual stocks are compounding upward across diverse sectors and size categories. When new lows begin to expand — even while major indices are holding near highs — it is a signal that deterioration is occurring beneath the surface.
The new highs/new lows ratio gained particular attention among technical analysts as a leading indicator during the 2007-2008 financial crisis. Beginning in mid-2007, new lows on the NYSE started expanding persistently while the Dow Jones Industrial Average was still trading near its peak. The persistent expansion in new lows was an early warning that financial and banking stocks — not widely held in the price-weighted Dow — were already under severe stress before the broader indices reflected the problem.
The 52-week high/low data is also important at the individual stock level. When a company breaks out to a new 52-week high on high volume, it is a technically significant event that often attracts momentum-driven buyers. Conversely, a stock crashing to a new 52-week low frequently triggers automatic stop-loss orders and can accelerate selling pressure. Many momentum-based quantitative strategies use the 52-week high/low universe as a core filtering criterion.
The net new highs indicator — calculated as new highs minus new lows — can be smoothed with a moving average to reduce daily noise and produce a trend signal. When the 10-day or 21-day moving average of net new highs crosses from positive to negative or vice versa, it is used by some analysts as a regime-change signal for overall market conditions. These kinds of breadth models are a standard component of the indicator toolkit used by professional market strategists.