Expected Move

Expected move is a rough estimate of how far a stock's price might swing, up or down, by a certain date. It's usually expressed as a dollar amount or a percentage, like "the market expects Apple to move plus or minus 8 dollars by Friday."

This number is derived from options prices, not from any prediction of direction. Options contracts have prices that bake in how much uncertainty traders think there is about a stock's future price. That uncertainty is called implied volatility. Traders and platforms plug implied volatility, the stock price, and the time remaining into a formula (often just the price of the at-the-money straddle, which is the cost of buying both a call and a put at the current price) to back out a range the stock is likely to stay within, most commonly framed as a one standard deviation range.

The nuance that trips people up: expected move is not a forecast of what will happen. It's a statistical range implying roughly a two-thirds probability the stock stays within that band by expiration, which also means there's a real chance, roughly one in three, that it moves outside that range. It says nothing about whether the move will be up or down, and it is only as good as the options market's current pricing, which changes constantly, especially around events like earnings.

It also is not a guarantee or a hard ceiling. A stock can and sometimes does move far beyond its expected move, particularly on surprising news. Think of it as the market's current best guess at a range, priced by supply and demand for options, not a promise.