Topic: How To Invest

Q: Pat, what are your feelings about the Relative Strength Indicator as a tool for deciding when to buy or sell? Thanks.

Article Excerpt

A: Technical analysis is the process that aims to analyze a stock’s recent and/or historical price movements to determine future prices. One form of technical analysis is the Relative Strength Indicator (RSI). It charts a stock’s current and historical strength, or weakness, based on its closing prices over a recent trading period. Specifically, it looks at whether a stock’s price on each of those trading days in the period closed up or down, compared to the previous day’s closing price. The RSI then compares the overall magnitude of a stock’s recent gains to the magnitude of its recent losses; it turns that data into a number that ranges from 0 to 100. J. Welles Wilder developed the indicator and introduced it in his 1978 book, New Concepts in Technical Trading Systems. RSI is most typically used on a 14-day timeframe, as first introduced by Wilder. Since then, the 9-day and 25-day Relative Strength Index indicators have also gained popularity. The centerline for RSI is 50…