Bitcoin's price posture: the 200-day average and RSI, explained
The Bitcoin tile shows a price, and under it two words most people skip: where price sits against its 200-day average, and whether momentum reads stretched. Those two readings are the first thing a professional desk checks. Here is what they mean.
The 200-day average
Take the closing price for each of the last 200 days and average them. That single number is the 200-day moving average, and it moves slowly because any one day is only half a percent of it.
Price above the 200-day average means the last several months have, on balance, been an uptrend. Price below it means the opposite. That is all it measures. It does not predict; it describes where you are.
It matters more than it should because so many people watch it. Funds, trading desks, and rule-based trading programs use it as a line between "uptrend" and "downtrend," so a cross of the 200-day tends to bring buying or selling with it. The line becomes a real thing because enough people treat it as one.
RSI, the momentum reading
RSI stands for relative strength index. It compares the size of recent up days to the size of recent down days over the last 14 days and produces a number from 0 to 100. The Board calls it momentum because that is what it measures: how fast and how one-sided the recent move has been.
Above 70 is the conventional "overbought" zone, which the Board calls stretched. Below 30 is "oversold," which the Board calls washed out. Between 40 and 60 is ordinary.
The word to remember is thermometer. RSI tells you the temperature of the move. It does not tell you when the weather changes. In a strong uptrend, RSI can sit above 70 for weeks while price keeps rising, and a reading of 80 is not a sell signal. It is a note that the move has been fast and that a pause would be normal.
How to read the two together
Above the 200-day with RSI between 55 and 70: a healthy trend, nothing unusual.
Above the 200-day with RSI above 80: the trend is intact but the recent leg has been fast. Pullbacks from here are common and do not, by themselves, mean the trend is over.
Below the 200-day with RSI under 30: selling has been heavy and one-sided. Bounces from here are common, and so are further declines. The reading says washed out, not bottom.
A cross of the 200-day in either direction is the event worth noticing. The Board marks the day it happens.
What it does not tell you
Neither number knows why price moved. A jump on ETF inflows and a jump on a short squeeze look identical to RSI. That is why the Board sits the Bitcoin tile beside the flow and leverage tiles: posture tells you where price is, and the other tiles tell you what is pushing it.
Where the data comes from
Daily closing prices come from CoinGecko. The Board computes the 200-day average and RSI-14 itself, using the standard formulas, at every site build, and shows the time of the last build under the tile.