Does an oversold RSI mean it is time to buy?
An RSI-14 reading below 30 means bitcoin is oversold and due to rally.
This rule has fired 21 times. A doubling followed within a year on 10 of the 21. On comparable days when it did not fire, a doubling followed 59.9% of the time.
| Times it fired | 21 | separate occasions, not days |
|---|---|---|
| What followed | 47.6% | a doubling within 365 days of that close |
| Happened anyway | 59.9% | comparable days when the rule did not fire |
| Difference | -12.3 pts | near zero means the signal added nothing |
Where the claim comes from
Wilder's RSI, 1978, applied to bitcoin by nearly every charting service and repeated constantly on social media. The 30/70 thresholds are conventional rather than derived.
How we tested it
Trigger: RSI-14 below 30. Scored as a bottom rule: did the price double 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-one occasions, the largest sample on the scorecard. Price doubled within a year after 47.6% of them. On comparable days when the signal did not fire, it doubled 59.9% of the time. Buying the oversold reading did worse than not looking at RSI at all, by 12.3 points.
What this does not mean
It does not follow that you should buy overbought readings instead. Inverting a bad rule rarely produces a good one, and this measures a single binary outcome, not returns.
What would change the answer
A different threshold, horizon or outcome definition could give a different answer. Those are stated here and the code is public; we would publish a better specification if someone proposed one.
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.