Triple RSI Strategy with 90% Win Rate: What 83 Trades Over 30 Years Really Show

The hook is deliberately provocative: a stock strategy that has won 90% of its trades over 30 years. Quantified Strategies calls it Triple RSI because three of its four entry conditions look at RSI. The team published the rules on its site years ago and has kept running the same logic on SPY ever since, and it shows the equity curve before revealing the rules: an almost straight rising line built from rare, selective entries. The message is clear — trade less, but trade the right pullback.

Long-Term Up, Short-Term Down: The Core Idea

The logic is simple and stubborn: the US stock market drifts upward over decades on inflation and productivity growth. To make the point, the video stretches the S&P 500 from 1960 to the present; panics and bear markets interrupt, but the slope stays up. Triple RSI does not fight that slope, it leans on it. It hunts only short-term pullbacks and closes each position within days. It is not about catching the absolute bottom, but stepping in when a rising staircase dips a few steps.

Four Rules and One Exit: What Triggers an Entry

The backtest vehicle is SPY, the ETF that tracks the S&P 500. Four conditions must fire together: the 5-day RSI must be below 30, RSI must have fallen for three straight days, the RSI reading three days ago must have been below 60, and the closing price must be above the 200-day moving average. The last one is the trend filter: only buy pullbacks in an uptrend, do not catch a falling knife. The exit is single-condition: close when the 5-day RSI crosses back above 50. There is no desire to stay invested long; buy weakness, sell the snap-back.

A single chart example makes the mechanics tangible. A red 200-day line runs across the screen, a green arrow marks the buy and a red arrow the sell. A blue zone highlights three consecutive down days in RSI just before entry. With price above the average the filter passes, RSI slipping under 30 triggers, and RSI reclaiming 50 triggers the exit. Everything is in the indicator, not in price targets or news reading.

83 Trades, 1.4% Average: What the Backtest Shows

The equity curve on screen climbs almost like a ruler — not the choppy market line but the accumulation of selective entries. The video counts just 83 trades since 1993, each averaging about 1.4% and a 90% win rate. The typical holding period is only five days. Written versions of the same strategy on the site show variants — 97 and 103 trades, 1.2% average, profit factors between 4 and 8 — the differences coming from exact RSI thresholds, dividend adjustments and filter updates in Amibroker. The video variant with 83 trades and 1.4% is the most conservative and selective. Low frequency caps annual return; the product page cites roughly 3.8% CAGR and about 5% market exposure. The strategy is not a standalone wealth machine, it is a low-correlation complement to buy-and-hold.

Context matters: Triple RSI is a descendant of Larry Connors’ 2-period RSI ideas. Classic Connors logic was buy when RSI(2) SMA200, exit when RSI(2) >65 or price crosses above its 5-day average. Triple RSI stretches the lookback to five days and tightens with three separate RSI conditions. Short-term mean-reversion families share the same lesson: fixed stop losses often shake you out just before the bounce. The Connors school prefers time and RSI exits, and Triple RSI follows that path with the RSI 50 exit.

The practical takeaway is patience. Two to three signals a year on average means months of waiting when no trigger fires. The video deliberately bridges to the next one: it promises to explain why the 200-day average matters so much. That filter does heavy lifting; false bottoms in downtrends are screened out and the win rate lifts. On the other hand, commissions, slippage and taxes eat into an average of 1.4% in a handful of trades; live results are rarely as clean as a backtest. The value appears not in isolation but as a high-accuracy, low-exposure satellite next to a core buy-and-hold.