CCI: an unbounded take on how far price has strayed

CCI measures how far the typical price — the average of the high, low, and close — has strayed from its own 20-period moving average, expressed in units of average deviation. Roughly: how unusual is today's distance from the mean, by this stock's own recent standards.

Despite the name it has nothing specific to do with commodities. It was developed for them and the label stuck.

Unlike RSI and stochastic, CCI is not bounded to 0–100. It can print +300 or −250 in a violent move. That is its main contribution to a panel of momentum indicators: it can distinguish between 'stretched' and 'extraordinarily stretched', where a bounded oscillator pinned at 99 cannot.

The ±100 thresholds are the standard convention, chosen because a substantial share of readings historically fall inside that band. As with every other threshold on this site, they are inherited conventions rather than per-stock calibrations.

Because it is built from a deviation-from-average calculation rather than a gain/loss ratio, CCI often turns slightly before or after RSI on the same chart. When the two disagree, that disagreement is itself the information — it usually means the move is either accelerating or decelerating in a way one formulation catches first.

This site does not try to arbitrate that. Both feed into the momentum score at their stated weights, and a split between them shows up as a momentum reading closer to neutral.