RSI 14 oversold, backtested
Almost everyone meets RSI the same way: 14 days, under 30 is oversold, over 70 is overbought. It is stated as a fact about markets and it is really a rule you can test, so this page tests it in its plainest form, with no trend filter and no stop, on whichever ticker you point it at. The version with a filter is the RSI-2 template; this one is the textbook, deliberately unhelped.
Over September 2021 to September 2026, this setup lost to simply buying and holding. €10,000 became €16,481 (+64.8%), against €18,305 (+83.0%) for buy & hold, over 6 trades, with a worst fall of 20.6%. That is a small enough number of trades that the result is an anecdote rather than evidence, however it reads.
The rules, exactly
This is what the run above loads. Every number in it stays editable: change the ticker, widen the stop, and run it again.
- Buy at the close when the 14-day Wilder RSI closes below 30.
- Sell at the close when it rises above 70. A further oversold reading while already holding is ignored.
- One position at a time, and a trade still open at the end of the window is closed at the last bar.
- 0.1% commission and 0.05% slippage per side.
Screens for: $10B+ · 2M+ shares a day · profitable. That filter does nothing on the single-stock run above. It is the pool this strategy is really meant to trade, and it comes into play when step 1 is switched from one ticker to the whole US stock market. The momentum screener is a free way to see a ranked pool like it today.
What to watch for
On a broad index, RSI reaching 30 is rare and reaching 70 is not, so this rule spends long stretches holding nothing at all and its return is not comparable to a buy & hold line without noticing that. The bigger warning is what the thresholds do in a downtrend: RSI can sit under 30 for weeks while a price keeps falling, and this rule buys the first day of that and holds through the rest. Look at the worst trade below, not the win rate.
Before you trust any backtest
A backtest is a measurement of the past under assumptions you chose, and the assumptions are where results go wrong. Three that matter here: the run covers five years of daily closes, so it has seen one bull market and one bad year rather than a full cycle; fees and slippage are included but your broker’s may differ; and a strategy that fired only a handful of times has told you almost nothing, however good the numbers look. The tool reports the trade count for that reason. Read it first.
Want to change the rules rather than the numbers? The full backtester builds a setup out of plain-English conditions, and this template arrives in it already loaded and editable.
The other prebuilt strategies
- Buy the dip: Buy any day that falls 2% or more, and sell ten trading days later. No filter, no stop.
- Golden Cross: Hold while the 50-day average is above the 200-day; step aside when it crosses back under.
- 20/50 cross: The same crossover idea as the golden cross, on faster averages: 20-day over 50-day.
- MACD crossover: Hold while the MACD line is above its signal line; go flat when it crosses back under.
- One-year high: Buy a close above the highest close of the past year; exit on a 50-day closing low.
- RSI-2 reversion: Buy an uptrending market when the 2-day RSI washes out below 10; sell the bounce above 70.
- Trend pullback: In a long uptrend, buy the dip that reclaims the 50-day average, a bounce off the trend.
- Impulse pullback: A fresh 6/18 EMA cross marks a brand-new trend; buy its first small dip as it resumes.
- Donchian breakout: Buy a 20-day high the way the Turtles did; exit on a 10-day low or the 2R target.
- Bollinger reversion: Buy a close under the lower 20-day band; sell the snap back to the middle band.