Qstick

What is Qstick?

Qstick is Tushar Chande's candle-body average: a simple moving average of close minus open over a short lookback. The name reflects its purpose, quantifying candlesticks: instead of eyeballing whether recent candles are mostly bullish or bearish bodies, Qstick collapses the bodies into one line. Above zero, closes have on balance been above opens, net buying during the bar; below zero, the reverse. Gaps between bars are ignored entirely, and there is no universal default length, though short lookbacks such as 8 bars are common in published examples.

It reads as a simple bias line. The zero cross marks the flip between net-bullish and net-bearish bodies, unusually high or low readings mark one-sided stretches, and divergence against price warns that a trend's candles are hollowing out even as price extends. Because Qstick is unbounded and scales with the instrument's price, its extremes have no fixed thresholds; they are judged against that market's own history.

How traders use it

• Zero-line crosses as a body-bias trigger: a cross above zero after a stretch of net-bearish candles says intrabar buying has taken over; some implementations add a moving-average signal line on Qstick for earlier crossovers.
• As candlestick confirmation: a bullish reversal pattern carries more weight when Qstick is already rising or above zero, because the average body agrees with the pattern's story.
• As a divergence check: price pressing to new highs while Qstick fades toward zero shows shrinking bullish bodies, the same caution read other momentum divergences give.

Qstick vs related candle-body measures