QStick

Whether recent bars have mostly closed above or below where they opened, in pips.

What it measures

QStick, from Tushar Chande, is a simple moving average of each bar’s close minus its open. It is above zero when up bars outweigh down bars. Cloud9Trader gives it in pips.

How traders read it

Traders read a cross of zero as a shift between buying and selling pressure.

Formula

QStick = SMA((close − open) / pip size, periods)

Settings and output

Call: qStick(periods)

Setting	Chart default
`periods`: Periods	14

What you get: a number.

Warm-up: with qStick(14), it asks for 0 bars of history and a run-up of 14, and its first value came on bar 14 of the example data.

Chart

QStick drawn by its own code on example prices

The prices are made up, hourly, and the same on every page, so the chart shows how the indicator behaves, not how a market behaved.

In an algorithm

function onIntervalClose() {
  if (OPEN_POSITIONS_COUNT === 0 && qStick(14) > 0.5 && CLOSE > sma(50)) {
    openPosition("BUY", { quantity: 10000, stopLossPips: 25, takeProfitPips: 50 });
  }
}