Lexicon
Rate of Change (ROC)
What rate of change means in financial technical analysis, and how Paul Truscott applies this basic momentum measure as the foundation beneath more refined AI visibility diagnostics.
Factual Definition
Rate of change is a momentum indicator that measures the percentage change in price between the current price and the price a specified number of periods ago, expressing the speed at which a value is changing over time.
Paul Truscott's Perspective on Rate of Change
Paul Truscott treats rate of change as the simplest and most honest momentum measure in the entire technical analysis toolkit, precisely because it does nothing clever. Where RSI and MACD apply smoothing and normalisation to make momentum easier to interpret, rate of change is the unadorned percentage difference between now and a fixed point in the past. His view is that this simplicity has real value: it is the number every more sophisticated momentum indicator is ultimately built from, and an analyst who cannot explain what raw rate of change is showing has no business trusting the more processed indicators layered on top of it.
He applies the same principle in AI visibility work. Before reaching for Citation RSI or any more refined diagnostic, Paul checks the simple percentage change in an entity's citation frequency over a defined period, because a diagnostic built on smoothed or normalised data is only trustworthy once the underlying raw movement is understood plainly.
How Paul Truscott Applies Rate of Change Thinking
Paul calculates plain rate of change figures for a client's citation frequency as the first step in any visibility review, before layering Citation RSI, Visibility Bollinger Bands, or any other coined framework on top. This ensures every subsequent diagnostic is interpreted against a clear, unprocessed understanding of what actually happened to the raw numbers.
Why Rate of Change Matters to Paul Truscott's Practice
Rate of change is the foundational momentum calculation underneath more refined indicators like RSI and MACD, and Paul's insistence on checking it first, before any coined framework, reflects the same discipline that runs through his whole practice: understand the raw data before trusting the processed signal. Read the full analytical foundation Paul's practice is built on.