AMP Limited

AMP Limited finished the week at $2.39, just 2.4% under a $2.45 52-week high and 109.6% above the $1.14 low that anchors the two-year chart. The structure behind that number is one of the more emphatic recoveries on the ASX board this year: price collapsed in February 2026 to the $1.14 low, spent four months repairing, then advanced almost without interruption from the $1.645 swing low of July 7 to the current close — a 45.3% run in seven weeks. Every trend measure on the page agrees with that reading, from a correctly stacked moving-average set to an ADX of 57.7 and Mansfield relative strength of +39.4% against the S&P/ASX 200. The complication, and the reason this page is not a one-sided document, arrives in the momentum panels: RSI is at 72.7 with a flagged bearish divergence, MACD registered a dead cross on August 14, and Friday traded 2.53× its average volume for an unchanged close two cents under the 52-week high.

Snapshot as of August 21, 2026

① Price & Moving Averages

The two-year frame divides cleanly into three acts. From September 2024 to January 2026 price oscillated in a $1.20–$1.90 band with no lasting direction. In February 2026 that band broke violently: the chart shows a vertical drop to the $1.14 low, which is both the 52-week low and the session the tool selected as its long-horizon VWAP anchor (February 12, 2026). That event sits roughly six months behind the current close and is stated here as chart context only. The third act is repair — a grinding recovery through March to June, then a genuine trend from July onward that has more than doubled price off the low.

The 90-day window isolates that third act. Price held a $1.55–$1.65 shelf through April and May, stepped up in early July, then advanced from the $1.645 low of July 7 to $2.13 by July 23. That $1.645-to-$2.13 leg is the swing the retracement grid is measured from — and it is worth saying plainly that price has since travelled well beyond the $2.13 anchor, so the entire grid now sits below the close rather than above it. The August extension carried through an unfilled gap at $2.19–$2.25 (August 6) to the $2.45 52-week high, then settled into a $2.30–$2.42 range for the past two weeks. The moving-average stack is textbook: SMA5 $2.36 above SMA20 $2.27 above SMA60 $1.88, all rising, with the close above every line. The one number that argues for caution here is the distance to the SMA60 — 27.1% — which is a wide stretch from the medium-term mean, and Bollinger Bands spanning $2.06 to $2.49 at 19.1% width leave only $0.10 of headroom before the upper band.

② Volume

Friday traded 30,936,396 shares against a 20-day average of 12,220,424 — a Vol/Avg ratio of 2.53×, and the largest bar in the 90-day panel apart from the early-June spike. What makes it worth a paragraph rather than a footnote is that the close was unchanged from Thursday at $2.39. Two and a half times normal turnover moved price nowhere.

That combination is genuinely ambiguous and this page will not pretend otherwise. Heavy volume with no net price change at the top of a long advance is the classic signature of supply meeting demand in size — the raw material of a distribution top. It is equally the signature of an index or portfolio rebalance passing through a liquid name, and a single session establishes neither. The honest reading is that the bar raises the stakes on whatever happens next: a follow-through close above $2.45 on similar turnover would re-frame it as absorption, while a decline through $2.36 on comparable volume would confirm the darker interpretation. The wider panel is more encouraging — through the July and August advance, up-days consistently carried the heavier bars, which is what a genuine markup phase produces.

③ MACD

MACD registered a dead cross on August 14, 2026. The line sits at 0.1224 against a signal of 0.1331, with the histogram at −0.0107. Both readings are the same on the 90-day frame to three decimal places, so there is no timeframe disagreement to resolve.

Context matters more than the label here. Both lines remain far above zero — the cross happened near the highest MACD readings of the two-year window, not below the zero line — which makes this a deceleration signal rather than a trend reversal signal. The 90-day panel shows the histogram expanding through the late-July surge, peaking in early August, and rolling into shallow red over the last several bars. That sequence is exactly what a trend does when it pauses at a high: the moving averages converge because price stopped accelerating, not because it turned. A histogram that deepens while price is beneath the SMA20 at $2.27 would be the version of this signal that matters; a return to positive with price holding $2.36 would mark the August range as a continuation pause.

④ RSI

RSI(14) reads 72.7 — above the 70 overbought threshold — and the tool flags a regular bearish divergence with both peaks identified. The first peak is July 23, 2026: price $2.13, RSI 86.5. The second is August 20, 2026: price $2.39, RSI 72.7. Price is 12.2% higher at the second peak while the oscillator is 13.8 points lower. That is a textbook divergence and it deserves to be taken seriously.

It also deserves two qualifications that beginners routinely skip. The first is that an RSI of 86.5 is an extraordinary reading — near the top of what the indicator produces — and a lower RSI on a subsequent higher high is close to arithmetically inevitable after a print that extreme. Divergences measured from a blow-off peak are the least reliable kind. The second is that divergence is a warning of possible exhaustion, not a confirmed top: it requires price confirmation, and price has not confirmed anything — the close is within 2.4% of the 52-week high. The way this resolves is visible on the chart, not in the oscillator. A daily close beneath $2.27 with the divergence in place would be confirmation; a new closing high with RSI holding above 70 would negate it.

⑤ Mansfield Relative Strength

Mansfield RS versus the S&P/ASX 200 stands at +39.4%, deep in outperform territory, with the slope tag reading rising. Both horizons point the same way, which is unusual and worth noting. A week ago the reading was +36.3%, so the weekly change is +3.0 points. A month ago it was +30.5%, so the monthly change is +8.9 points. Because the reading is positive and moving further from zero on both measures, this is acceleration in the strict sense — not merely a large lead being held, but a lead still widening.

The two-year panel supplies the contrast. Relative strength was strongly positive through late 2024, spent most of 2025 below zero as an index laggard, then collapsed to roughly −22 in the February 2026 break. It crossed back above zero around June 2026 and has run to the highest readings of the entire window since. A zero-line crossing followed by a sustained climb is the sequence that identifies a genuine change in the market's treatment of a stock, and it is the strongest single piece of evidence on this page. The counterweight is scale: a +39.4% lead is very large, and leads of that magnitude are consolidated more often than they are extended.

⑥ ATR & ADX

ATR(14) is $0.071, or 3.0% of price. That figure sizes the structural reference levels used throughout this page: 1×ATR below the close is $2.32 and the 2×ATR technical invalidation level is $2.25. The arithmetic is worth stating — a 2×ATR excursion is a 6.0% move, roughly two ordinary sessions for this stock, so $2.25 is a structural reference rather than a tight one. It also lands precisely at the top edge of the unfilled August 6 gap ($2.19–$2.25), so the volatility-derived line and the structural line agree with each other.

ADX(14) reads 57.7 on the two-year frame and 57.9 on the 90-day frame. That is not merely above the 25 threshold — it is among the highest readings anywhere on the two-year panel, exceeded only during the February 2026 break. The standard caution applies in reverse here: ADX measures the strength of a directional move, not its direction, and in February a comparable reading accompanied a collapse. Today the direction is unambiguously up from the moving-average stack, so a reading near 58 confirms an exceptionally strong advance. What it does not confirm is durability. ADX is a lagging measure of what has already happened, and extreme readings mark trends that are mature rather than young. The ATR line has been climbing steadily since mid-July, which means the daily range is widening as price rises — a reason to treat any single-session break of a level on this page with scepticism.

⑦ OBV

The two timeframes agree on position and disagree on slope, and both facts matter. On the two-year window OBV sits at 377,673,118 against a 20-day average of 341,979,822 — above the average, with a +10.4% divergence and an early-accumulation state, but the slope tag reads flat. On the 90-day window OBV is 243,505,052 against a 207,811,756 average, a wider +17.2% divergence, an accumulation state, and a rising slope.

Read together, this says that flow has been building strongly across the recent advance while the longer cumulative series has levelled off near its highs. That is a normal configuration at the top of a fast run — the 90-day series is dominated by the July and August markup, while the two-year series still carries the weight of the February collapse and the months of repair that followed. Neither frame shows the bearish non-confirmation pattern that would matter most here, which is price making a new high while OBV visibly lags; on both windows the line is at or near its own highs alongside price. The flat two-year slope is nonetheless the detail to file away — it is the first hint that the pace of flow has stopped increasing, which is the same message the MACD histogram is sending from a different direction.

Scenarios

Key Levels & Volatility References

What to Watch

• $2.45 — whether the 52-week high is cleared on volume, or Friday's 2.53× session marks a supply shelf beneath it. This single question resolves most of the ambiguity on the page.
• The $2.27 shelf where the SMA20 and the Bollinger mid-line converge. Above it the August range is a pause; below it the RSI divergence has its price confirmation.
• Volume character on down-days. A decline on turnover comparable to Friday's 2.53× would argue that supply is genuine; a fade on below-average volume would mark the pullback as ordinary.
• The MACD histogram at −0.0107 — whether it deepens with price under $2.27, or returns to positive while the $2.36 line holds.
• Mansfield RS versus the S&P/ASX 200 — whether the +39.4% reading keeps widening from the +36.3% of a week ago, or begins to roll over from an already large lead.

Conclusion

Past Analyses of This Stock same ticker · newest first

Other signals from this issue same publication date · 4 stocks

← All charts