What causes a stock to be range bound?

Question

What causes a stock to be range bound?

Answer 1

At a point when there are more buyers than sellers for a particular price.

Answer 2

Stock prices react on news. Good news will cause more people to want to buy a stock, which drives the price up. Bad news has the opposite effect.

But no news means that everything that is to be known about the company is already priced in. So the stock prices fluctuates but in a range, as the number of buyers and sellers only fluctuates slightly from day to day.

So called range traders reinforce the effect. These short terms speculators tend to buy at the lower bound of the range and sell at the high end, which creates artificial barriers around the range.

Answer 3

When the "supply" and "demand" are very close to each other.

Answer 4

Many traders of stocks look first to the chart before deciding to buy or sell.  Without a significant news item to push the stock out of its range, it tends to trade  a fairly consistent pattern until a news item, or analyst recommendation, earnings surprise, etc. causes the stock to break out either upside or downside.