CCI (Commodity Channel Index)
The Commodity Channel Index measures how far the typical price has stretched from its own recent average, in units of its own typical deviation. It is unbounded, and ±100 marks unusual territory.
CCI takes the typical price, the average of the high, the low and the close, and asks how far today's sits from its 20-bar mean, scaled by the average size of such deviations. The scaling constant is chosen so roughly three-quarters of readings land between −100 and +100. Beyond those lines, price is further from its average than it usually strays. Unlike RSI the scale has no ceiling: readings of ±200 happen and mean what they say.
Donald Lambert built it for commodities, and the use on daily equity bars is the same two-sided one. Mean-reversion traders treat the zone beyond −100 as washed-out and wait for the cross back, since leaving the zone is the first evidence selling has stopped. Momentum traders read a push through +100 the opposite way, as a stock breaking out of its normal orbit, and ride it while CCI holds above the line.
Those two readings contradict each other, which is the honest caveat. Whether +100 is overbought or a breakout depends entirely on context CCI does not contain. In a strong trend the index can hold beyond ±100 far longer than a mean-reversion trade can tolerate, and because it is unbounded there is no level that forces a turn. The usual repair is a trend filter deciding which of the two playbooks applies.
Against RSI, the mechanical difference is what gets measured. RSI compares up-closes to down-closes; CCI measures raw distance from the average, so it reaches its extremes faster and overshoots further. It behaves closer to a z-score of price than to a bounded oscillator, which is also why its thresholds are ±100 rather than 70/30.
In Sift
Written as cci(20). A working scan — stocks whose CCI left the oversold zone within two sessions while the long-term trend holds:
where cci(20) crossed above -100 within 2 bars and close > sma(200)1
of the 500 most-traded NSE stocks match today, as of 25 Sept 2026
Scans that use it
Prebuilt scans in the library whose query reads this value — each with a hit-rate replay over the last 250 sessions.
Common questions
What does a CCI reading above +100 mean?
Price is trading further above its 20-bar average than it usually strays, outside the band that contains roughly three-quarters of readings. Momentum traders read it as strength escaping its normal range; mean-reversion traders read it as stretch. Both readings are legitimate, which is why CCI is usually paired with a trend filter that decides which applies.
Is CCI better than RSI?
They measure different things. RSI compares the average size of up-closes to down-closes and is bounded at 0–100. CCI measures raw distance from a recent mean and is unbounded, so it reaches extremes faster and registers magnitude RSI compresses. Neither dominates; the useful comparison is running the same setup on both against history.