RVI Periods and Spread Costs: 2 Years Tested

RVI (the Relative Vigor Index) divides how far the close finished from the open by the bar's high-to-low range. The idea behind it: in a rising market, bars should close near their highs.

So what does changing its period do? I backtested ten periods, from 4 to 55, across the whole of 2025 on USD/JPY, on three timeframes, then ran all of it again on 2024.

The finding that shaped this article: widening the period from 4 to 55 barely changed how often RVI traded. On hourly bars, period 4 produced 1,336 trades a year and period 55 produced 1,078, a reduction of less than 30% despite a fourteen-fold increase in period.

And at more than five hundred trades a year, frequency is not a detail. It decides the result.

trades per year (left)2025 net pips (right)2024 net pips (right)

What RVI measures

For each bar, two quantities:

• Numerator: close minus open, weighted 1:2:2:1 across the last four bars
• Denominator: high minus low, weighted the same way

Divide one by the other and you have RVI, moving roughly between −1 and +1. Bars that keep closing near their highs push it positive.

That value is then summed over N bars to make the plotted line, and N is the only place the period appears.

There is a second line: the signal. It is RVI itself, weighted 1:2:2:1 over the last four bars. The period does not enter this calculation at all.

Trades come from the two lines crossing. So one line can be smoothed by the period while the other always chases it within four bars. The two can never drift apart for long, which means how often they cross is set by the signal line's construction, not by the period.

The measurements matched the theory.

Adding RVI to a chart

How this was measured

Does a longer period trade less?

The figure at the top of this article draws the table below.

Read the trade columns downward: everything sits between 1,043 and 1,336. Fourteen times the period, under thirty per cent of the frequency.

The P&L columns span more than 4,600 pips, from −1,546 to +3,072, and the two years disagree about which end is which. Period 18 lost in both. Period 8 made +272 pips in 2025 and lost 1,546 in 2024.

The period therefore left trading frequency nearly unchanged while annual net moved widely. One year's result is a weak basis for selecting it.

Five of the ten were profitable in both years: 4, 10, 14, 40 and 55. Period 14 produced +1,853.1 and +1,910.1 pips. The default period 10 produced +2,233.9 and +184.6 pips.

Can you use RVI on 15-minute bars?

Not on this evidence. Results by timeframe:

Hourly and four-hour swap places between the years. Fifteen-minute is bad in both, and the trade count is why.

Does the spread decide it?

It does. Same year, same settings, changing only the spread:

The 15-minute version makes +396.5 pips with the spread set to zero. Charging even 0.3 turns it negative; at 2.0 it loses 8,353.5.

The hourly version is not safe either: across the same range it gives up 2,188 pips, taking +2,562.1 down to +374.1.

Those numbers follow a rule.

Supertrend 10/3Aroon 25 crossoverQQE 17/3/4.236RVI 10dashed line = trades × 2.0 pips

Same pair, same year, same timeframe, only the indicator differs.

Every one is exactly trades × 2.0 pips. Trivial arithmetic, which is precisely why it never fails to apply. Choosing an indicator is choosing how much spread you will pay in a year.

RVI trades more often than any of the others here, so it is the most exposed of them.

Can win rate choose the period?

It cannot. Across the ten hourly periods in 2025, win rates ran from 41.61% to 44.94%, while annual net ranged from −183.8 to +3,071.8 pips.

Filters, added to period 10:

None of them beat the unfiltered 2025 result of +2,233.9 pips. ADX at 20 and 25 lifts the win rate a point or two and takes 2024 from +184.6 into the red.

Signs are a different matter. Three conditions stayed positive in both years (ADX ≥ 30 (+915.3 and +125.5), Tokyo hours (+315.0 and +640.1) and London/NY hours (+1,876.6 and +741.4)) each by cutting the trade count to between 30% and 60% of the original. Given that frequency is this indicator's weak point, a filter that removes trades and keeps the sign is worth something.

Stops and targets

All four stop-and-target variants lost money in 2024. The best of them in 2025 (stop 100, target 200) returned −332.6 the year before.

RVI trades are short, averaging 8.0 bars to the exit. Layering a fixed pip distance on top means the price band decides the trade before the indicator does. The 24-bar time exit changes almost nothing (identical to the baseline in 2024 and 11.9 pips away from it in 2025) for the same reason: a trade that ends in eight bars rarely reaches a twenty-four-bar limit. Holding to the opposite crossover was steadier across both years.

For the same test applied to other indicators, see QQE across 200 combinations, Aroon across 84 and Supertrend across 36. The conclusions differ by indicator, which is the point of running the same method on each.

Notes

• One pair, two years
• RVI varies little between implementations, but signal-line conventions differ. These figures come from Formiq's
• Entries and exits both fill at bar closes
• The spread is modelled as flat for the whole period; real spreads move with the session, and high-frequency settings feel that most
• Four-hour configurations trade about 275 times a year, in a narrow 271–333 band; the period made no difference to frequency there either