Bottom line: on a typical ES day, the RTH high and low are 0.90% apart. Half of all days fall between 0.62% and 1.34%.
Only 9.8% of days reach 2% or more, about one day in ten. Just 2.7% reach 3% or more.
How I use it: at the open, multiply the opening price by 0.9% to estimate roughly how many points today might move. If the day has already moved more than 2%, it’s a big-range day of the kind you only get about once every ten days.
I measure the intraday range as a percentage: if today’s RTH high and low are 80 points apart and the open is 8,000, the range is 80 ÷ 8,000 = 1%. Using percentages is the only way to compare 2010, when ES was around 1,000, with today’s prices.
2010–2026 · median intraday range
0.90%
3,924 trading days · half of days fall between 0.62% and 1.34%
Cumulative: what share of days stay under each rangeX axis: share of days. Y axis: range, drawn up to 4%.
By yearBar: middle half of days. Dot: median. Thin line: 10th–90th percentile. Click a year to see only that year. Dashed line: all-years median, 0.90%.
Range = (RTH high − RTH low) ÷ open. Hover (or tap) a bar to see how many days fall in that bucket and the cumulative share.
A typical day: around 0.9%
Out of 3,924 trading days:
- The median is 0.90%: half of days are smaller, half are larger.
- The middle half of days fall between 0.62% and 1.34%.
- Days with a range under 1% make up 57.1%; under 1.5%, 80.5%.
The distribution is right-skewed, not normal
The histogram rises steeply on the left and trails off in a long tail on the right. Most days are packed between 0.5% and 1.3%, but every so often there’s a 5%, 8% or even 10% day.
That’s why the average (1.11%) is higher than the median (0.90%): a handful of huge days pull the average up. For a “typical day”, the median is the better guide.
The biggest days:
| Date | Range | What happened |
|---|---|---|
| 2025-04-09 | 10.84% | Tariff pause announced, huge rally |
| 2025-04-07 | 8.49% | Selloff and rebound after the tariff announcement |
| 2020-03-13 | 8.35% | COVID panic |
| 2020-03-12 | 8.22% | COVID panic |
| 2020-03-16 | 8.05% | COVID panic |
By year: 2017 was the calmest, 2022 the wildest
- 2017 had a median of just 0.48%, the lowest in 16 years. A typical day moved half as much as in other years.
- 2022 had the highest median, 1.72%. It was a bear market: even the smallest 10% of days moved at least 0.98%, more than the 16-year median.
- 2020 had a median of 1.26%, but the longest tail: the biggest 10% of days (24 of them) were all above 3.53%, and 15 of those were in March.
- 2026 through September has a median of 0.87%, about the same as the 16-year figure.
The high-volatility years line up with the market backdrop: the 2011 European debt crisis, COVID in 2020, rate hikes and the bear market in 2022, and tariffs in 2025.
Definitions
- Data: cleaned 1-minute ES bars, 2010-06 to 2026-09, 3,924 trading days. See how I cleaned it. Half-day sessions were already removed during cleaning.
- Open: the open of the 09:30 1-minute bar.
- Range: (RTH high − RTH low) ÷ open.
Limitations
- It only looks at high minus low, not direction: up 1% and down 1% count as the same range, and where the day closes doesn’t matter.
- News days aren’t separated: FOMC, CPI and jobs-report days are counted together with ordinary days.
- Converting to points depends on the price level: the same 0.9% is more points when ES is trading higher.
(First published in May 2026. Updated in October 2026: recalculated with the cleaned data, and added the interactive distribution chart, cumulative curve and by-year view.)