Does an overbought RSI mean it is time to sell?
An RSI-14 reading above 70 means bitcoin is overbought and due to fall.
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 |
|---|---|---|
| What followed | 30.0% | a 40% fall within 365 days of that close |
| 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. A 40% fall followed 30.0% of them, against a 38.6% baseline. Big falls were less likely after the overbought reading than without it.
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.
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.
We are building that second tool. Until it is here, the Where Things Stand page gives the valuation state and what has historically followed readings like today's, with the sample size attached.
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.