Relative Vigor Index: does the close finish strong within the range

How the RVGI compares the open-to-close move against the bar range across four bars, and why it works better in ranges than trends.

Relative Vigor Index is free on Basis — the button opens a live crypto chart with it already applied. No account, no trial and no limit on how many indicators you add.

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What it measures

The RVGI compares how far price travelled from open to close against how far it travelled from low to high, summed over four bars with a triangular weighting.

The premise is that in an uptrend closes tend to finish near highs, so the ratio stays positive, and that the ratio turns before price does.

It is close kin to Balance of Power, with the four-bar weighting doing the smoothing that Balance of Power needs applied separately.

How it is calculated

These are the steps Basis performs, verified against the published definition.

1
For each bar compute close minus open, and high minus low.
2
Take a four-bar weighted sum of each using weights of one, two, two and one.
3
Divide the numerator sum by the denominator sum.
4
The signal line is the same weighting applied to the result.

Settings

Setting	Default	Range
Length	10	1 – 500

The four-bar triangular weighting is fixed in the original and most implementations expose only a period for the underlying calculation. Ten is a common default and lengthening it trades responsiveness for stability.

How to read it

Signal-line crossings are the primary event, in the same way as MACD.
The zero line separates bars that have been closing above their opens from those closing below.
Divergence against price is the strongest use, because the indicator measures close quality rather than price level.
It performs noticeably better in ranging markets, where the ratio actually oscillates, than in trends where it saturates.
Between RVGI and Balance of Power, prefer RVGI when you want a signal line to cross and Balance of Power when you want a raw per-bar reading you can smooth yourself. They are measuring nearly the same thing, and running both adds no information at all.

Where it misleads

The denominator is a sum of bar ranges, which collapses toward zero in a very quiet market and makes the ratio unstable exactly when nothing is happening. Combined with the fact that it saturates in trends, the RVGI has a fairly narrow band of conditions in which it says anything useful — moderate volatility, no strong trend — and reading it outside those conditions produces confident-looking noise.

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Balance of Power MACD Stochastic

Updated 2026-08-22 · Educational reference, not financial advice.