How often does price go nowhere?

Half of all days — 50.8% — close inside the previous day's range. But only 14.1% stay entirely inside it. That gap is the whole range-trading style: the market goes nowhere very often, and it almost never does it quietly.

Why doesn't "sideways" mean "still"?

Range trading has a bad reputation among trend traders and a good one among people selling the idea that the market is sideways 70% of the time. Neither position usually arrives with a measured number. Here are two, and they differ on purpose, because "going nowhere" can be defined two ways and each says something different.

We measured it with our own hourly bars: 5.7 years, January 2021 to September 2026, ten pairs and between 1,457 and 1,458 days compared against their preceding day, Sundays excluded.

Two ways of going nowhere

The second column is the share of days whose close falls inside the previous day's high and low. The third is the share of days whose entire range fits inside the previous day — the classic inside day.

Two readings, and the second is the useful one.

First: half of all days end up where they already were yesterday. The 50.8% median is remarkably stable across pairs — from 49.1% to 55.9% — and it supports the style's premise: reverting into the prior range is not a rarity, it is the most frequent outcome.

Second: only one day in seven actually stays put. The 14.1% median of inside days means the remaining 37% — the ones that close inside but trade outside during the day — broke the previous day's range and came back. That is not a sleeping market. It is a market that leaves, takes out stops, and returns. What happens on the days that do break — how many continue and how many return — we measured separately, in how many breakouts actually continue?.

So what does range trading demand?

That gap between 50.8% and 14.1% defines the entire style, because it is exactly where a badly traded range kills an account.

Stops outside the range, not on its edge. If your stop sits just beyond yesterday's high, you are standing in the path of that 37% of days that leave and return. A liquidity sweep is not an exotic theory: it is the ordinary way a day ends up closing inside.

A position size that survives the excursion. The same problem as the paragraph above, seen from the account, and it is solved with size, not with conviction.

Accepting an uncomfortable risk-reward ratio. The target sits inside the range and the stop has to sit outside it, so the ratio is structurally worse than in a trend style. It is compensated with frequency and hit rate, not with distance — which is why this style lives or dies on its metrics, not on how it feels.

Who does it fit, and who does it not?

It fits someone who tolerates many small trades, who keeps records and judges by expectancy rather than by feel, and who doesn't need the satisfaction of a big move. It fits badly anyone who places the stop where it "makes sense" on the chart — the edge of the range is the worst possible spot — and anyone who needs a generous risk-reward ratio to sleep.

What this post doesn't give you

• It doesn't detect ranges, it compares days. Our "going nowhere" is a mechanical definition of one day against the previous one, not a drawn channel or a trend indicator. A different definition would give a different number.
• 50.8% is not a win rate. It says where the day ends, not whether a given trade would have won. Between those two sit the entry, the stop and the cost.
• It doesn't measure the spread. We store no bid and ask prices, and in a style of small targets the cost weighs heavily.
• Medians over 5.7 years. There are whole stretches where the proportion shifts; the number is the period's average, not next month's.

A range isn't the market resting

The easy reading of this post would be "half the days nothing happens, so there is easy money selling the high and buying the low". The correct reading is the opposite: it very often happens that the day ends where it already was, and it almost always happens after leaving. A range trader doesn't get paid for calling the range — they get paid for surviving the exit. The full frame for why a style works in one context and not another is in whether the perfect strategy exists at all. And surviving that exit has a concrete rule that falls straight out of this number: the stop goes outside the previous day's range and never on its edge, and the size is worked out knowing in advance that 37% of days will push your nose outside before coming back. With those two decisions made before you enter, the style stops depending on calling the level.