Hello Guys,
Does this RSI strategy (Buy at 30 or below, Sell at 70 or above) still work? I’ve been learning forex for about 6 months but don’t have much money to buy a course.
Your suggestions mean a lot—I’d really appreciate your insights!
Hello Guys,
Does this RSI strategy (Buy at 30 or below, Sell at 70 or above) still work? I’ve been learning forex for about 6 months but don’t have much money to buy a course.
Your suggestions mean a lot—I’d really appreciate your insights!
Historical prices or any derivative of historical price does not have any predictive power as to where price will go.
RSI indication uses past periods, set by the user, then calculates the average up periods vs the average down periods.
The formula is as follows:
RSI = 100 - (100 / (1 + RS))
RS (Relative Strength) = Average Gain/Average Loss
Relative Strength Index (RSI) is calculated by first finding the Relative Strength by dividing the average daily gains by the average daily losses within a chosen lookback period, then normalizing the resulting Relative Strength number to a number between 0 and 100.
Once known what to look for, you should be able to look at a chart and know about what the RSI is without the indicator. Everything is on the Internet. There are no secret indicators or shortcuts to profitability.
That isn’t a “strategy”. It’s an idea. And not a great one.
A strategy needs a whole stack of details: stop losses, targets, conditions, risk-management and so on.
This idea on its own can’t “still” work, because it didn’t ever “work”.
Seriously, I’m not trying to criticise you, I promise (and we’ve all, at some point, “been where you are now”) but you need to start with a Big Think about what a “strategy” is and what it means for an indicator to “work”. Doing that will have real, long-term benefits for you that go way beyond the specific question you’re asking here. That question has a one-word answer (“No”) but that’s of really limited, almost no value to you at all, really.
Ryan’s comment above that there are no secret indicators or shortcuts to profitability is totally right.
My own guess is that overall, you might do better (i.e. lose less, but still lose overall) entering long positions when RSI moves above 70 and short positions when it moves below 30, because at least that way you’ll be trading with the trend rather than against it. Something to think about?
But the bottom line here is that “overbought” and “oversold” are slippery, tricky, probably fallacious concepts to start with.
If you read Robert Miner’s textbook (which by the way would be a far better use of your time than looking for information on the web), you’ll find his long explanation of why “overbought” and “oversold” are a pretty bad, high-risk and illogical approach to trading, and many traders with decades of successful experience certainly agree with him.
Sorry that it’s (obviously) not the kind of response you hoped for, and I hope that in the long run it may be more helpful to you than those answers would have been.
Yes- people use RSI the wrong way round!
If you are long and RSI says ‘overbought’ the market is agreeing with you.
If you are selling short and RSI says ‘oversold’ the market is agreeing with you.
I must admit I’ve been tinkering with it a bit, out of boredom, and I like 5 65 - 35 setting. It does sometimes confirm that I’m not doing something stupid, a second opinion so to speak
??? do you have a crystal ball?
I was kind of wondering the same thing, myself.
This whole business of “overbought” and “oversold” (with some other oscillating indicators, too, maybe not just the RSI?) does seem a bit peculiar.
If you trade it “the way people say” you’re basically hoping for a trend-reversal? That must be high-risk? I see that the occasional one might run in your favor, but you’re going to get a really low win rate, probably?
That makes sense to me (not that I know anything).
What about just “crossing 50”? I’m sure I’ve seen that mentioned somewhere. Can’t remember where, now.
Yes - crossing the ‘50’ I use as a kind of alert signal.
Sadly not. But extensive backtesting and forward-testing has shown me that I do better, in the long run, by having a fixed target for some proportion of my position size, and just letting the last part “run” (when it does, which isn‘t as often as I’d like).
I trade quickly from fast charts, with a high win-rate, and catch very few real runners. I more than make up for that with a high trade-frequency, though.
I instinctively look at the occasional runner I do miss as “a good trade for someone else, just not for me”. I don’t suffer from FOMO, anyway.
I completely take your point that nobody really has a crystal ball and that some people do better without a target by “taking what the market will give them”. Just as I’m sure you take mine that some people do better with a fixed target (especially when there’s a readily available one determinable by recent support or resistance, though I’d be the first to agree that that certainly isn’t always the case).
However, I should probably have mentioned only stop losses rather than targets as well!
@TheodoreThring
I do have a small confession to make -
Although I never set TP, I am mindful of s/r especially Daily Pivots.
I can see the point of TP if you can’t be at the screen, but having always, for 15yrs, been a 5mins/1min trader as I like to be in the moment - not asleep at the wheel waiting for a car crash to happen.
That’s not a real strategy, just a basic idea—and not a strong one. A proper strategy includes risk management, stop losses, and clear conditions. Instead of relying on overbought/oversold levels, consider trend-based RSI usage. You can study Robert Miner’s insights!