QuantMedia Signal Breadth Index
Signal Breadth is a QuantMedia metric. It measures how much of the scan universe currently qualifies as a BUY, which is a different question from whether any individual stock looks attractive: it describes participation. The reading below is regenerated after every US close from the same scan that produces the daily signal dashboard.
QuantMedia Signal Breadth is the share of successfully scored US equities whose confluence score reached the BUY threshold on a given market date. With a universe of 180 liquid US-listed equities scored against 30 binary technical signals and a threshold of 22, a breadth of 40% means 40% of the stocks scored that day had at least 22 of 30 signals simultaneously bullish.
Current reading
48 of 179 successfully scored equities reached the 22/30 threshold on 2026-09-03.
| Signal breadth | 26.8% |
|---|---|
| Median score | 17/30 |
| Mean score | 16.80 |
| Score dispersion (SD) | 5.75 |
| Score range | 5–27 |
| Universe / scored | 180 / 179 |
| Reading | Narrow participation |
| Market date | 2026-09-03 |
| Generated | 2026-09-04T01:07:07Z |
A minority qualifies. Setups are concentrated in fewer names and sectors.
Score distribution
| Signals active | Stocks |
|---|---|
| 5-9 | 20 |
| 10-14 | 44 |
| 15-19 | 51 |
| 20-24 | 45 |
| 25-29 | 19 |
Formula
The denominator is scored stocks, not the full universe. A ticker that fails the data-completeness gate on a given day — fewer than 60 clean sessions in the trailing year, a halt, a failed download — is excluded from both numerator and denominator rather than counted as a non-signal. Counting it as a miss would depress breadth for a data reason rather than a market reason.
How to read it
| Breadth | Label | What it implies |
|---|---|---|
| ≥ 60% | Broad participation | Most of the universe is in a confirmed uptrend. The BUY flag is at its least selective, and the score column carries more information than the flag. |
| 40–60% | Mixed | Roughly half qualifies. Sector dispersion usually matters more than the aggregate. |
| 20–40% | Narrow | Setups concentrate in fewer names and sectors. |
| < 20% | Few qualifying setups | The engine goes quiet by design rather than forcing low-conviction output. |
These bands are a vocabulary, not a model. They are a descriptive split of one number, published so the wording stays consistent between updates and so anyone can disagree with where the lines sit.
Limitations
- It is not a forecast. Breadth describes the state of the scan on a completed session. Nothing here is evidence that high or low breadth predicts subsequent returns, and QuantMedia publishes no study claiming it does.
- The universe is fixed and curated. 180 liquid US-listed names, not an index. Breadth measured on a different universe would produce a different number, and the two are not comparable.
- Trend-following bias. The underlying signals are momentum- and trend-weighted, so breadth mechanically rises in sustained advances and collapses at turning points. It lags inflections.
- Short history. The series starts when it was first published and is not backfilled, because the scan was not run historically under this methodology. Backfilling it would be inventing data.
- Threshold sensitivity. Breadth is defined against a fixed threshold of 22. When the median score sits near the threshold, small score shifts move breadth sharply.
History
One record per completed US trading session. The series starts on the day it was first published and is not backfilled — the scan was not run historically under this methodology, so earlier values do not exist and inventing them would be fabrication. Duplicate dates are impossible by construction: an existing record for a market date is replaced, never appended alongside.
History loads from /data/breadth_history.json. The full series is always available there as JSON even when the table below is still short.
Data and refresh
| Source | QuantMedia post-close signal scan (end-of-day OHLCV via Yahoo Finance / yfinance) |
|---|---|
| Methodology version | 2.0 (effective 2026-04-14) — stamped into every record |
| Cadence | Every US trading day, published after 23:30 UTC |
| Machine-readable | /data/signal_breadth.json · /data/breadth_history.json |
| Methodology config | /data/signal_config.json |
| Citation | Free to cite with attribution to QuantMedia and the market date |