A directionless measure of how much attention a name is drawing right now, expressed as a multiple of its normal volume. It does not say up or down: it tells you whether a breakout or a piece of news is being taken seriously by the crowd.
Relative Volume (RVOL) tells you how many times normal the current volume is.
Where OBV accumulates volume by direction to trace the footprints of supply and demand, RVOL looks at a single thing: how many people are here right now, compared with a typical session.
Because it is a multiple, reading it is intuitive. A value of 1.0 means a normal day, 2.0 means twice the usual activity, and 0.5 means trade is running at half its normal pace.
The key point is that RVOL has no direction. It will not tell you whether buyers or sellers dominate. What it measures is the total volume of attention: the heat in the name, the sheer amount of interest pointed at it this moment.
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NASDAQ:AAPL
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