Technical analysis

RSI (14)

What share of the last few days' movement has been to the upside, on a 0-100 scale.

Why it matters

It's technical analysis' best-known oscillator and answers a simple question: of everything price has moved lately, how much was upward? 50 means a tie. The classic reading — above 70 "overbought", below 30 "oversold" — needs care in Bitcoin: in a strong trend RSI can sit above 70 for weeks without that being a sell signal. It measures recent intensity, not exhaustion.

Build it yourself

Start from the already-smoothed average gain and average loss, and watch how they get compressed onto the 0-100 scale.

RSI = 100 − 100 ÷ (1 + Average gain ÷ Average loss)
RSI (14)

Notice RSI never reaches 0 or 100 unless one of the two averages is zero: it's a compression, not a linear scale of movement.

Illustrative example numbers for practice — not real data.

How it's calculated, step by step

  1. For each day the price change against the previous day is computed and split into two series: gains (down days count as 0) and losses as positives (up days count as 0).
  2. Each series is smoothed with a 14-period exponential average, giving average gain and average loss.
  3. RS = average gain ÷ average loss. RSI = 100 − 100 ÷ (1 + RS). The first value appears from day 14 onward.
Coincident signal. Implementation precision: the project smooths with a span-14 exponential average (α = 2/15), not Wilder's original smoothing (α = 1/14) that many platforms use. Values come out very close but not identical, so it isn't worth comparing number for number against another tool's chart. And the project's research verdict: as a standalone threshold rule it did not beat buy-and-hold; its place is as one input inside a model.

Chart

This is real Bitcoin data, computed from the blockchain — not the illustrative example above.

Data last updated on 2026-09-09.

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