You're a smart and successful trader... and I don't like to go against you. But you've got this wrong, IMV. The "range indicators" work for trading if you bother to learn about them. (They are not as simple as "buy oversold, sell overbought). 14 day/period is "stock" but can be adjusted to be longer or shorter time. I have a range indicator on all of my charts... from 2-minutes and longer. If there weren't some value to it, I wouldn't have them. FWIW...
Seems there are 4 range indicators most commonly followed... RSI, Stochastic, CCI and %R. I find CCI and %R to be too "jumpy" to be useful. RSI and Stochastic are similar and both useful when properly understood.
So many times when the RSI told me a stock was overbought or oversold it became a whole lot more overbought-er or oversold-er. So I'm suppose to keep moving the goalpost in the middle of the game?
RSI alone cannot tell you the whole picture, you need to club it with other indicators for better results.
With due respect to all those who use these indicators- the more you have them, the confusing it becomes. @maxinger in his post has actually made few imp points...one need to understand sone key things about every instrument and how it moves...keeping it simple...
I think RSI is only good for sleepy stocks like PEP, CSCO, etc. as an indicator in swing trading. Even then if there is a breakout from the previous range it won't be useful as an exit (like the recent breakout for CSCO). Works great for utilities & drug companies that just go up and down in a range. I haven't seen any indicator that really works for daytrading except maybe moving average. Too many ranges intraday for RSI to be useful unless the day itself is a range. Today's QQQ/NQ was essentially a trading range so it could work on these low volatility days. Most of my daytrading is on breakout from microcaps or earnings related news. These work entirely on momentum.
In this video: one of the tutors from Andrea Unger's Unger Academy (4 time world trading champion), explains and demonstrates a code in easylanguage to improve a trading system using the RSI.