Topic: How To Invest

Q: Hi, folks. What are your feelings about the Relative Strength Indicator as a tool to assist with the buying/selling puzzle? Thanks.

Article Excerpt

A: Technical analysis is the process of analyzing a stock’s past and historical price movements to attempt 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 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 and 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. The 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…