June 18, 2026·6 min read·By WideRadar

IBD RS Rating vs. WideRadar RS Score: What's the Difference?

IBD's Relative Strength Rating and the WideRadar RS Score both rank stocks by price performance — but they measure different things over different windows. Here's how they compare and when to use each.

Relative strength (RS) is one of the most powerful principles in active equity investing: buy what is already strong. But "relative strength" is not a single, standardized calculation — it's a concept implemented differently by different tools. Understanding the differences between IBD's RS Rating and the WideRadar RS Score helps you use each appropriately.

How IBD's RS Rating works

Investor's Business Daily (IBD) calculates its Relative Strength Rating by comparing a stock's price performance over the prior 12 months — with extra weight given to the most recent 3 months — against all other stocks in their database. The result is a percentile score from 1 to 99. An RS Rating of 95 means the stock has outperformed 95% of all stocks in IBD's universe over the past year.

IBD's general guideline is to focus on stocks with an RS Rating of 80 or above before a breakout, with the strongest setups often carrying 90+. The 12-month window means the RS Rating is a historical momentum measure — it reflects how a stock has done over a long period, not necessarily what it is doing right now.

How the WideRadar RS Score works

The WideRadar RS Score blends two timeframes: a 1-month and a 3-month relative performance window versus SPY (the S&P 500 ETF). The blend gives more weight to what has happened in the past month, making it more responsive to recent leadership changes than a 12-month look-back.

The score is expressed on a 0–100 scale. A score of 80 means the stock is outperforming approximately 80% of the universe on the blended 1m/3m metric. Because the window is shorter, the RS Score is more dynamic — a stock that has turned from laggard to leader in the past 6 weeks will show up in the WideRadar list well before it would surface in an IBD RS scan.

When to use each

The two tools complement each other rather than compete:

• IBD RS for trend validation: A stock with a 90+ IBD RS Rating has been a sustained outperformer. It's useful as a final confirmation that a name has real institutional sponsorship over a full year, not just a recent run.
• WideRadar RS for early detection: The 1m/3m blend catches emerging leaders sooner. When a stock has been a laggard but its RS Score is now rising sharply and it's appearing on the Emerging Leaders list, it may be in early accumulation — before the IBD Rating has caught up.
• Both high: A stock with an IBD RS Rating of 85+ and a WideRadar RS Score of 80+ is a sustained leader that is also showing recent relative strength. This combination is often the strongest signal set.

The trend filter: the key additional layer

The WideRadar Leaders tab adds a structural filter not present in the basic IBD RS Rating: it only shows stocks where the 50-day SMA is above the 200-day SMA. This removes stocks that may look strong on relative performance but are structurally in a downtrend — a category that produces a disproportionate share of false breakouts. IBD addresses this separately through its chart pattern analysis and the Composite Rating; WideRadar bakes it into the stock list itself.