Does an overbought RSI mean it is time to sell?
An RSI-14 reading above 70 means bitcoin is overbought and due to fall.
Where we are now. Today RSI-14 is 52, against a threshold of 70. Shaded bands are the 20 occasions the rule fired, the same ones counted in the table below: 2010-09, 2011-12, 2012-04, 2013-08, 2014-05, 2014-11, 2015-03, 2015-06, 2015-10, 2016-04, 2016-10, 2018-07, 2019-02, 2020-01, 2021-07, 2022-03, 2023-01, 2023-10, 2024-10, 2025-05.
This rule has fired 20 times. A 40% fall followed within a year on 6 of the 20. On comparable days when it did not fire, a 40% fall followed 38.6% of the time.
| Times it fired | 20 | separate occasions, not days |
|---|---|---|
| Still open | 1 | fired since 2026-08-20; the 365-day window has not closed, so these are excluded from the figures above rather than counted as a success or a failure |
| What followed | 30.0% | a 40% fall within 365 days of that close |
| Could plausibly be | 16% to 48% | the range the true rate could take, on this many occasions, before you invoke anything but chance; a binomial interval that treats the episodes as independent trials |
| Happened anyway | 38.6% | comparable days when the rule did not fire |
| Difference | -8.6 pts | near zero means the signal added nothing |
Where the claim comes from
The mirror of the oversold reading, and equally conventional.
How we tested it
Trigger: RSI-14 above 70. Scored as a top rule: did a 40% fall follow within 365 days?
Only days the rule could have fired are counted. Consecutive triggers within 90 days are one occasion. The baseline excludes each trigger and the 90 days after it, because the aftermath of a signal is not a fair comparison. No verdict is given below 20 occasions.
What the numbers say
Twenty occasions. 30.0% followed by a 40% fall within a year, against 38.6% on comparable days when the rule did not fire: a 8.6-point gap, negative, on 20 observations. Big falls were less often after the overbought reading than without it, and the interval still contains the baseline. Overbought RSI has told us nothing here, and on the cross-asset page it tells us nothing anywhere.
What this does not mean
Both directions of RSI being anti-signals on this specification is a coherent result, not a contradiction: RSI measures recent direction, and recent direction persisted more often than it reversed.
And it does not mean the threshold itself was chosen fairly. Every rule in this registry was specified by someone who had already seen bitcoin’s history, so the cut-off is fitted to the record it is being judged against. The interval above measures sampling variation between independent trials and nothing else: not the choice of threshold, not that cycle turns are few and related, and not that thirty-six rules were tested in total. Only the forward record, which fixes a rule before its answer is known, avoids this.
What would change the answer
As above. Thresholds and horizon are conventions, not findings.
If you cannot time it, the question changes
Most of the claims in this registry cannot be shown to beat a coin flip, and several are worse than one. That is not an argument against holding bitcoin. It is an argument that the decision worth spending effort on is how much to hold, not when to buy.
That is what How much bitcoin? is for: what fixed weights actually did in a conventional portfolio, and how much the answer depended on the year you started. For the valuation state today, and what has historically followed readings like it, see Where Things Stand.
Recomputed from the daily public snapshot by fetch/scorecard.py and published as scorecard.json. Method on the methods page; every claim in the scorecard.