Open any market app and tap a stock, and you’ll see a panel like this (real data for one stock on 2026-07-02):
| Field | Value |
|---|---|
| Open | 37.50 |
| Close | 38.00 |
| High | 38.25 |
| Low | 37.50 |
| % Change | +1.44% |
| Change | 0.54 |
| Volume | 646,600 lots |
| Turnover value | ¥2.454 billion |
| Amplitude | 2.00% |
| Turnover rate | 1.17% |
Ten numbers, and a beginner probably understands only “close: 38.00.” This article unpacks every one of them — and you’ll find they’re all derived from just three raw inputs: yesterday’s close, and the price and size of every trade today. By the end, this whole panel will be transparent to you.
Four prices: open, close, high, low
- Open: the price of the day’s first trade. Note that it isn’t randomly matched at 9:30 — it’s the result of the 9:15–9:25 call auction (Part 3 covers that mechanism in detail).
- Close: the price of the day’s last trade. It’s the most important price of the day — percent change is computed from it, your account’s market value is computed from it, and so are fund NAVs and index levels.
- High / Low: the extreme prices among all of the day’s trades.
For the stock in the table: the open was 37.50 and the low was also 37.50, meaning the open was the day’s lowest point and the price never came back down; the close of 38.00 sits near the high of 38.25. Strung together, the four prices already tell a story: a slightly weak open, then strength all day, closing near the top. That’s the embryonic form of what the next article on candlesticks will call “a bullish candle with almost no shadows.”
Percent change vs. price change: two phrasings of the same move
- Price change = close − previous close = 38.00 − 37.46 = ¥0.54. So yesterday’s close was 37.46 — note the panel doesn’t show the previous close at all; it’s “hidden” inside the change figure.
- Percent change = change ÷ previous close = 0.54 ÷ 37.46 = +1.44%.
Two details:
- The base for percent change is always the previous close, not today’s open. The open of 37.50 was above the previous close of 37.46, but some people mistakenly think percent change is measured against the open — it isn’t.
- This +1.44% is simultaneously constrained by the price-limit rules: ±10% on the Main Board, ±20% on ChiNext and the STAR Market, ±30% on the Beijing Stock Exchange (covered in Part 2 of the Mainland China Investable Universe series). The percent change on the panel can never exceed its board’s limit.
In Chinese market software, red means up and green means down — exactly the opposite of Western software, so be careful not to mix them up when reading English-language materials.
Volume and turnover value: how much money passed through today
- Volume: the number of shares traded today, displayed in “lots.” 646,600 lots = 64.66 million shares (1 lot = 100 shares — the basic trading unit of A-shares).
- Turnover value: the sum of all money traded today — ¥2.454 billion.
Dividing one by the other gives the day’s average traded price: ¥2.454 billion ÷ 64.66 million shares ≈ ¥37.95 — between the low of 37.50 and the close of 38.00, which checks out. This little cross-check is worth remembering: it tells you “where most of today’s shares actually changed hands.” If the average price is far below the close, most volume happened at low levels and the price was pulled up late in the day.
Volume itself has no direction; it measures disagreement: heavy volume means lots of people want to buy and lots want to sell at the same time. A rally on expanding volume and a rally on shrinking volume are two entirely different kinds of market — the candlestick article will expand on this.
Amplitude: how much ground the stock “covered” today
Amplitude = (high − low) ÷ previous close = (38.25 − 37.50) ÷ 37.46 = 2.00%.
The question it answers: regardless of where the price ended, how wide was the intraday swing? Two stocks both closing up 1.44% — one with 2% amplitude, one with 15% — are completely different experiences; the latter means you might have been down 8% intraday before recovering. Short-term traders watch amplitude for opportunities; long-term investors use it to gauge a stock’s “nervousness level.”
Turnover rate: how many shares changed owners today
Turnover rate = volume ÷ free-float shares = 1.17%.
Free-float shares are the portion of the stock that can actually be traded on the market (Part 4 explains the difference between total shares, free-float shares, and restricted shares). A turnover rate of 1.17% means today’s traded volume equals 1.17% of all float — if the shareholder base stayed the same, the entire float would change hands roughly once every 85 days.
Rule-of-thumb magnitudes (individual A-shares, not iron laws):
- < 1%: quiet trading, normal for large caps;
- 1%–3%: normally active — the stock in our table sits here;
- 3%–7%: clearly active, usually with capital attention or news catalysts;
- > 10%: high turnover, common in small caps and theme stocks — shares changing hands fast, intense gaming, rising volatility;
- > 20%: extreme turnover, often one of the signals near emotional tops and bottoms.
The turnover rate is the only one of the ten numbers that must be read relative to the stock’s own history: if a stock has run at 0.8% for ages and suddenly prints 5% for three straight days, that “abnormality” carries more information than any absolute value.
Which to watch, which to skip
A priority list for beginners:
- Check every day: close (determines your market value), percent change (today’s move).
- Read together: volume + turnover rate (the “quality” of the move — is real money participating, or is it a rise on air?).
- Check occasionally: amplitude (feel the volatility personality), open/high/low (reconstruct the day’s story — the next article’s candlestick automates this).
- No need to check separately: price change (just another way of writing percent change), turnover value (volume × price, redundant information).
Next article: draw these four prices as a candlestick, add a moving average — and you’ll fully understand the market app’s main screen.
This article explains terminology only and does not constitute investment advice.