Wick to Body Ratio Trend Forecast

1) One-line summary

This indicator (by Fluxchart) compares the wick-to-body ratio of the latest candle to historical analogues and projects an average forward path on your chart, color-coding each forecast step by dispersion/confidence.

2) The problem it solves (TL;DR)

Candlestick wicks vs bodies often reveal imbalance between aggressive and passive flows. Instead of reading a single candle in isolation, this tool hunts the past for candles with similar wick/body structure, then projects the typical path that followed comparable setups—giving you a data-driven, visual “what usually happens next” for the next N bars.

3) How it works — intuition

1. Compute a ratio per candle that encodes wick/body relationships (four modes available).
2. Find historical candles whose ratio is sufficiently close to the current one (optionally only same bullish/bearish direction).
3. For each match, take the price trajectory around the match (see “Algorithm details”) and average those trajectories to draw a forecast line ahead of the current bar.
4. Use dispersion (standard deviation) among matched paths to color each segment: tighter agreement ⇒ lower dispersion; wider disagreement ⇒ higher dispersion.

Practical read: the slope of the projected line suggests likely path; the color hints at confidence.

4) The four ratio modes (when to use which)

• General Ratio (default)
  Compares total wick length to body, signed by candle direction.
  Use it for a balanced, all-purpose analogue search.
• Top Wick Ratio
  Focuses on the upper wick relative to body, signed by direction.
  Use it when upper rejections/exhaustion (selling into highs) are central to your thesis.
• Bottom Wick Ratio
  Focuses on the lower wick relative to body, signed by direction.
  Use it for hammer-type absorption or lower-shadow demand clues.
• Body Ratio
  Body vs full range.
  Use it to emphasize closing strength within the bar’s range (breakout/drive conditions).

5) Inputs & defaults (cheat sheet)

Note on colors: by default blue = lower dispersion (higher agreement), red = higher dispersion (lower agreement).

6) What you’ll see on the chart

• Forecast polyline ahead of the last bar: one segment per future step up to forecast.
• Color per segment from dispersion: blue ≈ more agreement among matches; red ≈ less.
• Boxes around historical analogue windows (if enabled), so you can visually audit what the indicator considered “similar.”
• Text labels with the computed ratio for the current bar and each match (if enabled).

7) Algorithm walkthrough (step by step)

1. Compute the ratio & sign
   • Based on ratioType, the indicator calculates myRatio using OHLC and assigns a sign from candle direction (bullish = +, bearish = −).
   • The General mode normalizes total wick vs body; Top/Bottom isolate upper/lower wick contributions; Body uses body vs full range.
2. Adaptive matching loop
   • Start from an initial accuracy (0.02, modified by defaultAccuracy).
   • Scan up to loopback bars back. For each past bar i, compare absolute ratios |myRatio[i]| vs |myRatio[1]|.
   • A match occurs if the difference ≤ accuracy and, when directionBias=1, the sign matches.
   • The loop widens accuracy if < 5 matches, tightens if > 15; otherwise it accepts the set (guarded by a safety loop of 20 passes).
   • If accuracy exceeds 0.10 with zero matches, a warning is displayed and the routine exits.
3. Build the forecast path from analogues
   • For each matched bar, the code aggregates relative price changes over the forecast length into arrays:
     candleValue = close[i - y - 1] - close[i] for y = 0…forecast-1.
   • Those values are averaged across matches to obtain an average trajectory avgCurrent, avgNext.

   Implementation nuance: the indicator projects forward the average pre-move path around each analogue, applied from today’s close. In practice, this works like a pattern-shape template.

4. Confidence via dispersion
   • It computes a standard deviation for each step from the sums of squares, and toggles the color:
     low dispersion ⇒ deviationLow (default blue), high dispersion ⇒ deviationHigh (default red).
5. Draw it
   • The forecast is drawn ahead of the last bar using DRAWSEGMENT, from close[1] + avgCurrent to close[1] + avgNext, step by step.

7) ProBuilder code

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