Rising momentum / falling momentum (QTT – QTG)

Core idea

When RSI closes a candle at 80 or above within a rising wave, that wave is considered to have rising momentum: the market's belief and greed are dominant, and that belief can't be reversed overnight. Because of that, right at the signal wave's high, we can already forecast that after the correction leg there will be a continuation wave at least back to the old high or beyond it (~80% probability) — instead of having to wait for the correction wave to confirm it. Falling momentum is the mirror: RSI closes a candle at 20 or below.

Details

Why it has value — shortening the A + B = C equation

The pure price-action approach: to know whether there'll be a wave C, you need signal wave A, then you wait for correction wave B (holding above A's Fib 0.5) to confirm A's validity, and only then do you get to eat C. That means waiting out two unknowns before acting.

With RSI, the moment wave A forms its high and pulls RSI to close a candle above 80, we can already draw out C in advance — no need for B yet. The double benefit:

• For those without a position yet: build the scenario ahead of time, waiting for the correction leg to buy, and capture the entire continuation wave.
• For those already holding: you have grounds to hold through the correction leg instead of getting tortured by a sideways stretch and closing out too early.

The four stages of rising momentum

(The later teaching version splits this into 4 stages; the K2-2022 version combines it into 3 — same content, just a different numbering. See the note at the end.)

Falling momentum: exactly the same but reversed — a falling wave pulls RSI to close a candle below 20 (Stages 1–2), RSI crosses up into a correction (Stage 3), then crosses back down, bringing price to a new low or deeper (Stage 4).

A chain of successive waves: within an uptrend, the completion stage (Stage 4) usually simultaneously creates new rising momentum (RSI closes a candle above 80 again) → which becomes Stages 1–2 of the next cycle. Linking one after another like this builds an entire uptrend leg.

The required conditions & how to measure strength

• It must CLOSE on the candle. A wick poking up to 80 and then closing back below 80 doesn't count. The signal is only confirmed once the RSI candle has closed.
• The more candles closing above 80 → the stronger the momentum.
• The higher above 80 RSI goes → the stronger the buying pressure, the more solid the validity.
• Multiple consecutive highs all closing above 80 → extremely strong.
• Combined with a spike in trading volume in that stretch → even better.
• Just barely touching 80 and no more → still counts as rising momentum but it's weak, needs more observation of how price moves.
• Applies to every timeframe, from 1 minute to 1 month — because this is a psychological law, not a property of any particular timeframe.

A closer look at stage 3

On the price chart, the correction leg often goes sideways in a chaotic way, and it can be very hard to tell whether it's a correction wave or something else. Looking at RSI makes it clear: RSI falling + price holding support firmly → no selling pressure involved, just buying pressure resting → this confirms it's a correction wave. If there were real selling pressure, support would have already broken.

Two additional checks for a healthy Stage 3:

• RSI during the correction leg doesn't break below 40 (below 40 is when strong selling pressure has come in).
• The price correction doesn't drop below Fib 0.5 of the main wave → the previous wave's validity is still preserved.

Why the market has to have a correction leg instead of rising in one straight shot: the buy side's money is limited, so it has to come in waves; and more importantly, price jumping too fast causes a psychological shock (rice at 5,000đ last week and 30,000đ this week means nobody will buy, and whoever has it sells). The correction leg is there to pump psychological fuel — letting the crowd get used to and accept the new price zone, before pushing further.

When momentum is CONFIRMED BROKEN (fail)

Both of the following conditions must be met, occurring during the correction stage:

1. RSI closes a candle clearly below 40 (for rising momentum) — or closes above 60 (for falling momentum).
2. Price closes a candle below Fib 0.5 of the main wave (for rising momentum) — or climbs above Fib 0.5 of the falling wave (for falling momentum).

Explained with the rice-market metaphor: at the moment momentum is confirmed, the market has 80 buyers / 20 sellers. While the 80 buyers rest, about 40 of them jump over to the selling side → left with ~40 buyers / 60 sellers. At that point, even if the 40 buyers come back, they still can't beat 60 sellers. RSI dropping below 40 is exactly the evidence that the number of sellers has overtaken buyers (by roughly 1.1x or more).

Why both conditions are required: to filter out noise. There are stretches where RSI only wobbles around 40 (say, 39.5) but price still holds above Fib 0.5 → not broken yet. You have to treat 40 as a zone with margin for error, not a mathematical point like "1 + 1 = 2." You need several candles closing below it and price pulling down below Fib 0.5.

After momentum breaks: the bounce legs upward are now only bounce waves within the falling wave, no longer expected to break past the old high. At this point, switch to counting a new structure: the falling wave B has broken A → drop A, examine C; if C holds within B's Fib 0.5, then B's validity is preserved → wave D continues falling; if C breaks B's validity, then the two sides are going back and forth breaking each other → that's a range, no trend.

A metaphor the teacher uses: this lesson only teaches you to recognize that the bike tire has already gone flat. Forecasting in advance that it's about to go flat is taught in a later session (the teacher mentions roughly session ~16).

When momentum weakens / runs out of force

The deciding sign: the completion stage happens WITHOUT creating new momentum — that is, price does rise again but RSI can't close a candle above 80 (or below 20) anymore. At that point, the trend on that timeframe has weakened, needs time to reset, and you have to look to a bigger timeframe to see whether it still has fuel. This is an important take-profit signal.

The 80/20 probability — what makes up the other 20%

The teacher stresses: 20% is not a small number. Three kinds of failure:

• It completes but weakly: only returns to exactly the old high zone, without breaking past it, or barely breaking past it.
• Doesn't complete: bounces up but doesn't reach the old high before dropping back.
• Drops straight down, without even a bounce wave. The filter for knowing in advance which stretch falls into the 80% and which into the 20% is multi-timeframe.

BTC's chain of monthly-timeframe momentum (an example the teacher teaches)

On the monthly timeframe, BTC from 2013 to now has stayed within one long-term uptrend — which is why on this chart rising momentum shows up more often than falling momentum.

• 2013: the monthly RSI closes a candle above 80 → the first rising momentum (Stages 1–2).
• It then corrects (Stage 3) → completes (Stage 4) exactly at the 2017 top, which simultaneously creates new rising momentum.
• 2018–2020: the monthly RSI goes through the correction stage of the 2017 rising momentum.
• It completes → creating the 2021 uptrend leg, and 2021 in turn creates the next rising momentum (the March–May 2021 high closes a candle above 80).
• But the late-2021 high only rose to the old high zone and failed to create new rising momentum → a signal that the market had already weakened, with no grounds left to expect 100k–120k the way the crowd was saying.

Three momentum-reading mistakes commonly corrected in Q&A sessions

Three RSI Q&A sessions show students making mistakes in exactly these three spots:

1. "Close to 80" is not yet momentum. The condition is RSI closing a candle at ≥80 (or ≤20). A single high at 78–79 doesn't count yet; but if there are multiple consecutive highs holding around 78–80, that's counted as momentum already having formed. A wick that pokes up and then immediately stalls back = not yet. (The detailed condition for the wick-poke case isn't clear in the transcript — check again if you want the exact wording.)
2. Stage 3 has to EXPAND, not just "cross down." RSI crossing below the 2 moving averages and then expanding away from them is what completes the momentum. Crossing down and immediately crossing back up, with the two lines not spreading apart, means the momentum on that timeframe is not yet completed.
3. Mistaking a smaller timeframe's stage 3 for the timeframe you're currently watching. Seeing H1 cross down and then cross back up while price still makes a higher high → that's almost certainly 15m/30m just completing their own momentum, while H1's rising momentum is still intact. How to check: turn on the smaller timeframe directly and see whether its RSI is expanding.
   • A technical consequence: H1 and 90m are practically one timeframe (90m ≈ 1.5 H1 candles) → don't read them as two independent signals.
   • Added from Session 27: never read a signal off a candle that's still running. A live candle that looks "about to contract" is meaningless — it can be climbing now and drop before it closes.

Why you have to wait for the candle to close before you can read the force

Multi-timeframe logic when the bigger timeframe has already crossed down:

• The bigger timeframe has already crossed down and the 2 moving averages have already spread apart, holding for several candles → the smaller timeframe is already in a falling trend too. There's no such thing as the smaller timeframe still "opening a third rising leg" there; what you're seeing is just noise from a super-small timeframe completing its own momentum.
• The bigger timeframe has only just barely crossed, the 2 lines haven't spread yet → the smaller timeframe still has room to jerk upward to finish completing its own rising momentum before it falls.

The hard boundary of "resting": 60 and 40

An RSI uptrend can be either increasing buying pressure or just selling pressure resting — two very different things in nature, and there's a quantifiable boundary to tell them apart, which the teacher states verbatim in Session 10:

If it's genuinely selling pressure resting, RSI only hovers in the 60-and-below zone. If it's genuinely buying pressure resting, RSI only hovers in the 40-and-above zone.

Reason: 60 and above means the buy side has already become noticeably larger than the sell side — that's no longer "the sell side taking a break," it's the buy side genuinely stepping in. So if RSI is already sitting above 60 and someone still calls that stretch "selling pressure resting," they've gotten the nature of it wrong; mirror that, once RSI has collapsed below 40, you can't call it "buying pressure resting" either.

Application: use these two exact markers so you don't mistake a bounce leg for a real shift in force, and vice versa.

Checking a wave's momentum using a SMALLER timeframe

To know whether the wave currently running still has momentum or is about to run out, don't just look at that timeframe itself. Look down at the smaller timeframe: can it still create new momentum, and can that momentum still pull the parent timeframe up into a new momentum zone.

• Yes → the wave still has fuel.
• No → the force has already weakened from the inside, high chance of a strong correction, even if the parent timeframe still looks "pretty."

This is exactly the technical side of "bigger timeframe allows, smaller timeframe supports" — the smaller timeframe losing support is the earliest signal.

Putting it into practice

1. Scan the timeframe you're trading: has any RSI candle closed above 80 (or below 20) within the wave that just ran?
2. If yes → build the scenario ahead of time: wait for the correction leg to finish before entering in the same direction, targeting at least the old high/low.
3. During the correction leg, watch the two fail conditions. Not both met yet → the scenario is still alive, keep holding.
4. Already have a position from before → use the momentum as grounds to hold through the sideways zone, don't close out too early.
5. Once it reaches the completion stage, check: has it created new momentum? No → get ready to close out.
6. Filter with multi-timeframe: momentum on a smaller timeframe that's out of phase with a bigger one → lower your expectations.

What the teacher stresses / common traps

• When rising momentum is in effect, absolutely don't go looking for a top to short; when falling momentum is in effect, don't try to catch the bottom. The crowd's belief only flips after a process of erosion, it doesn't flip overnight.
• Don't guess in advance whether momentum will be strong or weak. At that moment you only need to know "there is momentum." You're only allowed to conclude it's weak/about to fail once there's real evidence (e.g. a bigger timeframe gets pulled into a rising state).
• Only a closed candle counts — repeated here because it's the most common mistake when first applying this.
• The teacher recounts a student who was still up to sessions 35–40 and, when asked, still couldn't remember the stages of momentum → ended up with no results. This is theory you must have memorized, not just loosely understood.
• Still hold to the core principle: Trade what you see, not what you think — momentum is evidence the market provides, not your own expectation.

Note: the 3-stage version

In the K2-2022 course, the teacher splits rising momentum into 3 stages:

1. Confirming rising momentum exists (price rises + RSI closes a candle above 80).
2. Correction – accumulation (RSI crosses below the two moving averages, spreads downward; price corrects or goes sideways).
3. Rising momentum completes (RSI crosses back up, price returns to the old high or higher). That is, Stages 1+2 of the newer version are combined into Stage 1. Same content — use whichever version, as long as you're consistent.

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