Divergence worth writing down — and divergence to discard

Divergence is the section of RSI momentum analysis that attracts the most confident mistakes. A shallow pullback on price with a slightly lower RSI print is not automatically a story.

The filter we use in drills

1. Define the swing points on price first — in ink or digital markup — before looking at the oscillator.
2. Require clear RSI peaks or troughs that map to those swings, not mid-bar noise.
3. Ask what higher-timeframe momentum is doing before treating the divergence as actionable context.

Mild scepticism welcome

In reviews we encourage participants to discard more divergences than they keep. The goal of technical analysis training here is judgement under quiet conditions, not collecting every squiggle that resembles a textbook diagram.