Momentum indicator

RSI (30): what it's actually best at

RSI (30) is an oscillator rule in our momentum family — it reads a bounded momentum gauge and takes exposure when it turns from an extreme. We publish where it holds up and where it fails, with the out-of-sample numbers; the exact settings we tested stay in the engine.

Tested and published by IndicatorEdge · backtest grid generated 2026-09-30 · base rates recomputed 2026-10-11 · how we test

0 of 869

assets where it was the #1 edge — it never won outright (honest note below)

on the other 869, a different indicator did better

0.3

average Sharpe across all tests

median across all 382 indicators is 0.26 — this one ranks above 258 of them

Momentum

indicator family

Base rate

How often RSI (30) beat buy-and-hold

299 of 1,750 out-of-sample tests beat simply buying and holding the same asset — 17.1%. On the other 1,451 it did not. That is indistinguishable from the 18.8% rate across all 382 indicators we test (one pooled rate over all 644,149 tests we have run, not a mean of the per-indicator rates) — the difference is inside the margin this many tests can resolve, so read it as ordinary, not better or worse.

Each test is one asset on one timeframe: 1,750 of them, drawn from 869 assets across up to 4 timeframes. Not every asset has usable history on every timeframe, so that total is the grid we could actually run — it is not 869 × 4, and we do not pad it with tests we did not do. "Beat" means a higher return than holding that same asset over that same window. Measured out-of-sample — on data the setup was not chosen on.

Picking the single best timeframe for each asset after the fact raises it to 25.3% (220/869 assets). That number is the one worth distrusting: choosing the timeframe once you already know the answer is how backtests flatter themselves. Every indicator, ranked by this number

What's on this page — and what isn't

We publish the verdict: the indicator's name, the assets and timeframes it holds up on, and the honest numbers for both its wins and its failures. We do not publish the recipe — the settings, lengths and thresholds we tested. That is the part worth paying for, and republishing it would just add one more free indicator to a market that already has thousands. Everything you need to judge whether RSI (30) is worth your attention is below; everything you'd need to clone it is not.

Honest note

In our standard-settings test, RSI (30) wasn’t the single best indicator for any asset — it was outperformed by others on every one. That’s useful to know too: no indicator wins everywhere.

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RSI (30): what it's actually best at

How often RSI (30) beat buy-and-hold

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