Crosses versus levels: the two ways a condition fires

If a rule fired whenever its conditions were true, that RSI level would message you on every candle of a two-week slide.

So a rule fires on the change, not on the state. The candle where the rule's answer goes from not-true to true is the one that produces a signal. While the answer stays true, nothing further happens. You get told when something starts, once.

This has one consequence worth knowing in advance, because it looks like nothing happening.

Say your exit fires while your entry condition is still true. Price is above its moving average, and you have just sold. You are flat, the entry condition has been true the whole time, and no new entry fires.

The entry rule waits until its answer has gone not-true and then true again. Without that, selling into a still-true state would buy you straight back in on the next candle, and again after the next exit, indefinitely.

A cooldown is a separate thing you can set on top: a fixed number of candles to sit out after any exit. This one is not a setting and applies to every strategy.

One detail about how crosses above is judged. If the previous candle's value landed exactly on the line rather than below it, and the current one is above, that still counts as a crossing.

It sounds like a technicality until it costs you a signal. Values settle on round thresholds like 30 or 70 more often than you would expect, and a stricter reading would silently throw away every crossing that started from one.