Qstick

Qstick distills candle color into one line: a simple moving average of close minus open over the last 8 bars, so readings above zero mean recent bodies are net bullish and readings below zero mean intrabar selling has the upper hand. This build renders Qstick with a four-state color scheme — bullish or bearish by side of zero, full-strength while the line extends away from it and faded while it rolls back — plus a 9-period EMA signal line and a gradient fill that grows more opaque the further the average body stretches from zero. Gaps between bars never enter the calculation; only what happens inside each bar counts.

How to Trade the Qstick?

• Zero cross up: average bodies flip net bullish — buyers are winning the open-to-close battle.
• Zero cross down: the bearish mirror, intrabar selling taking over.
• Signal-line crosses: Qstick crossing its EMA gives an earlier trigger than the zero cross, echoing the signal-line convention.
• Fading segments: the muted line states flag pressure stalling before any cross prints, so acceleration and exhaustion read apart at a glance.

Four alerts cover both zero crosses and both signal-line crosses.

Qstick Settings

• Qstick Length (default 8): bars in the body average. There is no universal setting — short lookbacks time turns, longer ones smooth the line into a bias filter.
• Signal Line (default enabled) with Length (default 9): the EMA overlay, 9 mirroring the classic signal-line convention.
• Gradient Fill (default enabled): the zero-anchored fill; the remaining inputs set the growing/fading, signal-line, and zero-line colors.

Frequently Asked Questions

How does Qstick differ from MACD?

MACD measures the spread between two smoothed price averages, so it responds to movement between bars as well as within them. Qstick averages only the open-to-close body, ignoring gaps entirely — a purer read of intrabar conviction, at the cost of missing gap-driven momentum.

Why does Qstick ignore gaps?

By construction: close minus open contains no information about the jump from the prior close. That is deliberate — the candle body records the session's directional verdict, and Qstick quantifies nothing else. On gap-heavy symbols, pair it with a gauge that sees closing prices.

Is Qstick comparable across instruments?

No. The line is unbounded and scales with the instrument's price, so a given value means nothing out of context. Judge extremes against the line's own recent range on the same chart rather than against fixed levels.