EVE Online Technical Analysis Guide: RSI, MACD & Bollinger Bands

Open any item's market window and there's a price chart staring back at you — the same daily candles, moving averages, and volume bars a stock trader reads before breakfast. Most EVE players never look past "line go up." The one-line takeaway: technical indicators don't predict the future in New Eden any more than on Wall Street, but they turn "the price feels high" into a measurable statement — and traders who measure beat traders who feel.

This guide covers the five indicators worth knowing for EVE markets — moving averages, Bollinger Bands, RSI, MACD, and ATR — plus the EVE-specific caveats that make blind chart-reading dangerous. It builds on the market window guide, which covers the raw readouts these indicators are computed from.

Why TA works at all in EVE (and when it doesn't)

Technical analysis is just statistics on crowd behavior, and EVE has real crowds: thousands of daily trades on staples, human psychology attached to every one. Prices overshoot, revert, trend, and consolidate for the same reasons they do anywhere.

But EVE adds two regime-breakers real markets mostly lack. Patches: a balance change reprices a module overnight, and every indicator computed across that boundary is describing a market that no longer exists. Thin books: on an item trading a dozen units a day, one player's restock is a "trend." So the first rule is a filter, not an indicator: apply TA to liquid items only, and reset your mental chart at every patch note that touches your market.

The five that matter

Moving averages (SMA 7/20). The 7-day average is what the price has been doing lately; the 20-day is the neighborhood it lives in. Price above both and rising: trend. The 7-day crossing above the 20-day is the classic momentum signal (a "golden cross"), and the reverse warns the run is tired. In EVE these work best on slow, deep markets — minerals, ammo staples, PLEX.

Bollinger Bands (20-day ± 2σ). A volatility envelope around the 20-day average: statistically, most closes land inside it. Price hugging the upper band = strong but stretched; price piercing the lower band on a stable item = the mean-reversion buy that pays station traders' rent. Bands that visibly squeeze tight signal a quiet market coiling before a move — often around anticipated patches.

RSI (14-day). One number, 0–100, answering "how one-sided have the last two weeks been?" Above ~70 the buying has been relentless (overbought); below ~30 the selling has (oversold). RSI is the impulse check: the module that spiked on a doctrine change and now reads RSI 85 is the one you don't chase.

MACD. Two smoothed averages and their gap, capturing momentum shifts earlier than the SMAs themselves. When the MACD line crosses its signal line, the trend's acceleration just flipped — useful on multi-week moves in big markets, noise on small ones.

ATR (Average True Range). Not a direction — a width. ATR says how far this item ordinarily moves in a day, which sets your expectations honestly: a 5% dip on an item whose ATR is 6% is a Tuesday, not a signal. Position sizing against ATR is how you stop mistaking normal wiggle for opportunity.

Reading them together

No single indicator earns ISK; agreement does. The setups worth acting on look like stacked evidence:

Setup	The stack	The trade
Mean reversion	Stable item, price at lower band, RSI < 30, volume normal	Buy the fear, sell the average
Confirmed trend	Price > SMA7 > SMA20, MACD positive, volume rising	Ride it, trail your exit
Exhaustion	Upper band ride + RSI 80+ + volume fading	Sell into it; don't open longs
Coiling	Band squeeze + flat RSI ~50	Wait — the move picks its own direction

One EVE-specific override outranks the whole table: known future events beat charts. If a patch nerfing a ship drops tomorrow, its chart today is trivia. TA fills the gaps between news, not the news itself.

ISK Scout's market analysis page computes all five indicators on any item's history and rolls them into a combined buy/sell/neutral read with strength grading — the same math as this guide, minus the manual squinting. The station trading guide shows where these signals slot into an actual flipping routine.

Recap — chart-reading for capsuleers

• TA measures crowd behavior; EVE has crowds. It works — on liquid items, between patches.
• SMA 7/20 for trend, Bollinger for stretch, RSI for one-sidedness, MACD for momentum turns, ATR for honest expectations.
• Act on agreement, never on one indicator's opinion.
• Volume filter first: a dozen-trades-a-day chart is one player's mood, not a market.
• Patch notes outrank every line on the chart. Read both.