Currency strength indicators are not new. What is new — and what most retail implementations miss — is the recognition that not all currencies trade with equal weight, and that strength on a single timeframe tells only a fragment of the story. Institutional desks have known this for decades. The Weighted Average RSI (WA-RSI) applies the same logic to a tool retail traders already use.
The Bank for International Settlements (BIS) publishes triennial surveys of global FX market turnover. The 2025 data provides a clear picture of how currency flows are distributed — and those distributions are far from equal. Treating every currency as equivalent when constructing a strength index produces a distorted view of market dynamics.
| Currency | BIS 2025 Volume Share | Relative Weight in WA-RSI |
|---|---|---|
| USD | 89.2% | High |
| EUR | 28.9% | High |
| JPY | 17.3% | Medium-High |
| GBP | 12.9% | Medium |
| CNY | 7.2% | Medium |
| AUD | 6.4% | Medium-Low |
| CAD | 6.2% | Medium-Low |
| CHF | 5.0% | Low-Medium |
| NZD | 2.7% | Low |
Note: BIS shares sum to more than 200% because each transaction involves two currencies. The figures above represent each currency's share of global FX turnover.
The WA-RSI system reads RSI across four timeframes simultaneously, each carrying a different analytical role. Signals that align across multiple timeframes carry substantially higher conviction than those appearing on a single chart.
For each currency, the system computes a standard 14-period RSI on each of the four timeframes. These four RSI values are then combined using timeframe weights, producing a single Weighted Average RSI value that represents the currency's strength across the full analytical horizon.
The WA-RSI output is most useful not as an absolute number but as a relative ranking. The currency with the highest WA-RSI score is the current session's strongest currency; the lowest score identifies the weakest. The highest-conviction trades arise from pairing the strongest against the weakest — provided both readings are diverging rather than converging.
Large banks and macro hedge funds do not trade individual currency pairs in isolation. They assess the relative strength of all major currencies simultaneously and allocate capital toward the largest divergence. A retail trader watching only EUR/USD is seeing one facet of a market that institutional participants see in eight dimensions at once.
The WA-RSI system is designed to close that gap — not by adding complexity, but by applying the same volume-weighted, multi-timeframe logic that institutional analysts use as a matter of routine.