Relative Strength (RS) measures how a stock's price performance compares with the rest of the market — a way to see who is actually leading, not who is loudest. WealthStar expresses it as a 1–99 rating across the whole Nifty 500 + F&O universe, recomputed daily after the NSE close.
The RS Rating is a percentile rank of a stock's trailing price performance against every other name in the universe. A rating of 90 means the stock has outperformed roughly 90% of its peers over the measurement window. It is a leadership gauge — it says nothing about whether a stock is cheap or expensive, only how its price has behaved relative to the field.
In the IBD-style method WealthStar uses, each stock's return is measured over several trailing windows — about 3, 6, 9 and 12 months — and blended into a single performance score, weighting recent performance a little more heavily. Every stock's score is then ranked into a percentile from 1 to 99. Because it is a rank, RS is always relative: as some names strengthen, others must fall.
Higher is stronger. Leaders in an advance tend to carry high RS; names losing leadership see their RS drift lower even if the price looks flat, because peers are moving faster. The direction of RS over time is often more informative than the single number — a rising RS line shows a stock gaining ground on the market; a falling one shows it lagging.
This is the most common confusion. The RS Rating is a cross-sectional percentile rank versus other stocks. RSI (the Relative Strength Index) is a momentum oscillator computed from a single stock's own recent gains and losses, bounded 0–100. They share a name and nothing else.
Traders watch relative strength because strength tends to persist. Stocks already leading the market have, on average, a better chance of continuing to lead over the medium term than laggards have of suddenly catching up — institutions accumulate the same names over weeks and months, and that steady demand shows up as sustained relative strength before the crowd notices. RS won't tell you the future, but it points your attention at where leadership already is, rather than where it used to be.
A few practical notes. Pair RS with trend stage — RS tells you who's leading, stage tells you where in the move they are. Watch the direction, not just the level: an RS rising from 70 to 90 often matters more than one flat at 95, because it catches leadership as it emerges. And treat it as a filter, not a signal — a high RS narrows the field to names worth studying; it is the start of your analysis, not the end.
Educational analysis only. WealthStar shows descriptive data and classifications — not buy/sell calls, price targets, or investment advice, and it is not a SEBI-registered research analyst service. Do your own research.