Divergence is when price and momentum disagree. Price makes a new extreme, the RSI does not, and the gap between them says the move is running on less force than it looks.
Bullish: price prints a lower low, RSI prints a higher low. Sellers pushed price further down but with less momentum behind it. Bearish: price prints a higher high, RSI prints a lower high — the advance is losing force.
The same comparison, inverted, and it means continuation rather than reversal. Hidden bullish: price makes a higher low while RSI makes a lower low — a pullback that went further in momentum than in price, inside an uptrend. Hidden bearish is the mirror. Most guides skip hidden divergence entirely, which is a mistake, because in a trending market it fires more often than the regular kind.
We compare swing pivots, not raw bars. On hourly candles we find the pivot highs and lows in price over a 80-bar lookback, take the RSI-14 value at each of those same pivots, and compare the last two of each. A divergence only counts if the second pivot is recent — within the last 25 bars — so a stale disagreement from weeks ago is not reported as a live signal. The RSI gap must also exceed one full point, which filters the noise that makes naive divergence scanners fire constantly.
Divergence is a condition, not a trigger. It tells you the current move is weakening; it does not tell you when it turns, and momentum can diverge for a long time while price keeps going. We show it as one column among many rather than as a call on its own.
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Bullish and hidden-bullish divergence on the 1-hour chart, ranked by turnover. The scanner has the bearish side too. Full table on the trend scanner.