RSI is the most screened indicator in crypto, and the most misread. Here is what an oversold reading actually tells you.
The Relative Strength Index compares the size of a coin's recent gains to the size of its recent losses over a lookback window — 14 candles by convention — and expresses the result on a 0–100 scale. High means gains have dominated recently. Low means losses have. That is the whole concept.
The traditional thresholds are 30 for oversold and 70 for overbought. They come from Welles Wilder's original 1978 work on stocks, and they are conventions rather than laws of nature.
"Oversold" does not mean "cheap", and it does not mean "about to bounce". It means the recent candles have been overwhelmingly red. In a genuine downtrend, RSI can sit under 30 for a very long time while price keeps falling — a condition traders call staying oversold. Buying every sub-30 reading is not a strategy; it is a way to catch every falling knife in the market.
What a low RSI genuinely gives you is a shortlist: coins where selling pressure has been unusually one-sided lately. Whether that is exhaustion or the middle of a collapse is a question the indicator cannot answer, and you need the chart, the trend, and the context to judge it.
Crypto is more volatile than the equities market RSI was designed against, and it trades continuously with no closing bell. Two practical consequences:
Checking RSI on one chart is trivial. The reason to use a screener is that the interesting question is comparative: out of every pair on the exchange, which ones are stretched right now?
On altscreenerai, RSI Oversold and RSI Overbought are two of the built-in conditions. Pick one, pick a candle size, and the scan returns every matching pair out of 500+ with its current price, 24-hour move, and volume, so you can sort the list rather than read it top to bottom.
A single condition on a 500-pair universe usually returns too many matches to act on. Stacking a second one narrows it to something a human can actually review — for example RSI oversold and price near the lower Bollinger Band, which requires momentum and volatility to agree rather than trusting either alone.
| Candle size | Typical use | On altscreenerai |
|---|---|---|
| 1d | Swing positions held days to weeks | Free |
| 8h / 4h | Multi-day setups, the common default | Free |
| 1h / 30m | Intraday entries and exits | Paid plan |
| 15m / 5m / 3m | Scalping and short-term timing | Paid plan |