RSI Is a Reading, Not a Buy Signal
Why treating 30 and 70 as automatic triggers creates noisy entries, and how to describe RSI as pressure instead.
Relative Strength Index often arrives in trader lore as a pair of horizontal lines: buy below 30, sell above 70. That shorthand travels well in screenshots and poorly in live markets.
RSI measures the balance of recent up closes versus down closes over a chosen lookback. When price stretches, the oscillator stretches with it. Stretch alone does not define opportunity; context does.
In training we ask students to narrate what RSI is saying about pressure before they invent a trade. Is momentum cooling while price still prints higher highs? Is the oscillator recovering from a deep print while structure remains broken?
Those sentences matter more than crossing a round number. Once the narrative is clear, rules about entries become easier to test and easier to discard when they fail.