Quantile Regression Bands [BackQuant]Quantile Regression Bands
Tail-aware trend channeling built from quantiles of real errors, not just standard deviations.
What it does
This indicator fits a simple linear trend over a rolling lookback and then measures how price has actually deviated from that trend during the window. It then places two pairs of bands at user-chosen quantiles of those deviations (inner and outer). Because bands are based on empirical quantiles rather than a symmetric standard deviation, they adapt to skewed and fat-tailed behaviour and often hug price better in trending or asymmetric markets.
Why “quantile” bands instead of Bollinger-style bands?
Bollinger Bands assume a (roughly) symmetric spread around the mean; quantiles don’t—upper and lower bands can sit at different distances if the error distribution is skewed.
Quantiles are robust to outliers; a single shock won’t inflate the bands for many bars.
You can choose tails precisely (e.g., 1%/99% or 5%/95%) to match your risk appetite.
How it works (intuitive)
Center line — a rolling linear regression approximates the local trend.
Residuals — for each bar in the lookback, the indicator looks at the gap between actual price and where the line “expected” price to be.
Quantiles — those gaps are sorted; you select which percentiles become your inner/outer offsets.
Bands — the chosen quantile offsets are added to the current end of the regression line to draw parallel support/resistance rails.
Smoothing — a light EMA can be applied to reduce jitter in the line and bands.
What you see
Center (linear regression) line (optional).
Inner quantile bands (e.g., 25th/75th) with optional translucent fill.
Outer quantile bands (e.g., 1st/99th) with a multi-step gradient to visualise “tail zones.”
Optional bar coloring: bars trend-colored by whether price is rising above or falling below the center line.
Alerts when price crosses the outer bands (upper or lower).
How to read it
Trend & drift — the slope of the center line is your local trend. Persistent closes on the same side of the center line indicate directional drift.
Pullbacks — tags of the inner band often mark routine pullbacks within trend. Reaction back to the center line can be used for continuation entries/partials.
Tails & squeezes — outer-band touches highlight statistically rare excursions for the chosen window. Frequent outer-band activity can signal regime change or volatility expansion.
Asymmetry — if the upper band sits much further from the center than the lower (or vice versa), recent behaviour has been skewed. Trade management can be adjusted accordingly (e.g., wider take-profit upslope than downslope).
A simple trend interpretation can be derived from the bar colouring
Good use-cases
Volatility-aware mean reversion — fade moves into outer bands back toward the center when trend is flat.
Trend participation — buy pullbacks to the inner band above a rising center; flip logic for shorts below a falling center.
Risk framing — set dynamic stops/targets at quantile rails so position sizing respects recent tail behaviour rather than fixed ticks.
Inputs (quick guide)
Source — price input used for the fit (default: close).
Lookback Length — bars in the regression window and residual sample. Longer = smoother, slower bands; shorter = tighter, more reactive.
Inner/Outer Quantiles (τ) — choose your “typical” vs “tail” levels (e.g., 0.25/0.75 inner, 0.01/0.99 outer).
Show toggles — independently toggle center line, inner bands, outer bands, and their fills.
Colors & transparency — customize band and fill appearance; gradient shading highlights the tail zone.
Band Smoothing Length — small EMA on lines to reduce stair-step artefacts without meaningfully changing levels.
Bar Coloring — optional trend tint from the center line’s momentum.
Practical settings
Swing trading — Length 75–150; inner τ = 0.25/0.75, outer τ = 0.05/0.95.
Intraday — Length 50–100 for liquid futures/FX; consider 0.20/0.80 inner and 0.02/0.98 outer in high-vol assets.
Crypto — Because of fat tails, try slightly wider outers (0.01/0.99) and keep smoothing at 2–4 to tame weekend jumps.
Signal ideas
Continuation — in an uptrend, look for pullback into the lower inner band with a close back above the center as a timing cue.
Exhaustion probe — in ranges, first touch of an outer band followed by a rejection candle back inside the inner band often precedes mean-reversion swings.
Regime shift — repeated closes beyond an outer band or a sharp re-tilt in the center line can mark a new trend phase; adjust tactics (stop-following along the opposite inner band).
Alerts included
“Price Crosses Upper Outer Band” — potential overextension or breakout risk.
“Price Crosses Lower Outer Band” — potential capitulation or breakdown risk.
Notes
The fit and quantiles are computed on a fixed rolling window and do not repaint; bands update as the window moves forward.
Quantiles are based on the recent distribution; if conditions change abruptly, expect band widths and skew to adapt over the next few bars.
Parameter choices directly shape behaviour: longer windows favour stability, tighter inner quantiles increase touch frequency, and extreme outer quantiles highlight only the rarest moves.
Final thought
Quantile bands answer a simple question: “How unusual is this move given the current trend and the way price has been missing it lately?” By scoring that question with real, distribution-aware limits rather than one-size-fits-all volatility you get cleaner pullback zones in trends, more honest “extreme” tags in ranges, and a framework for risk that matches the market’s recent personality.
Quantile
Rolling QuartilesThis script will continuously draw a boxplot to represent quartiles associated with data points in the current rolling window.
Description :
A quartile is a statistical term that refers to the division of a dataset based on percentiles.
Q1 : Quartile 1 - 25th percentile
Q2 : Quartile 2 - 50th percentile, as known as the median
Q3 : Quartile 3 - 75th percentile
Other points to note:
Q0: the minimum
Q4: the maximum
Other properties :
- Q1 to Q3: a range is known as the interquartile range ( IQR ). It describes where 50% of data approximately lie.
- Line segments connecting IQR to min and max (Q0→Q1, and Q3→Q4) are known as whiskers . Data lying outside the whiskers are considered as outliers. However, such extreme values will not be found in a rolling window because whenever new datapoints are introduced to the dataset, the oldest values will get dropped out, leaving Q0 and Q4 to always point to the observable min and max values.
Applications :
This script has a feature that allows moving percentiles (moving values of Q1, Q2, and Q3) to be shown. This can be applied for trading in ways such as:
- Q2: as alternative to a SMA that uses the same lookback period. We know that the Mean (SMA) is highly sensitive to extreme values. On the other hand, Median (Q2) is less affected by skewness. Putting it together, if the SMA is significantly lower than Q2, then price is regarded as negatively skewed; prices of a few candles are likely exceptionally lower. Vice versa when price is positively skewed.
- Q1 and Q3: as lower and upper bands. As mentioned above, the IQR covers approximately 50% of data within the rolling window. If price is normally distributed, then Q1 and Q3 bands will overlap a bollinger band configured with +/- 0.67x standard deviations (modifying default: 2) above and below the mean.
- The boxplot, combined with TradingView's builtin bar replay feature, makes a great tool for studies purposes. This helps visualization of price at a chosen instance of time. Speaking of which, it can also be used in conjunction with a fixed volume profile to compare and contrast the effects (in terms of price range) with and without consideration of weights by volume.
Parameters :
- Lookback: The size of the rolling window.
- Offset: Location of boxplot, right hand side relative to recent bar.
- Source data: Data points for observation, default is closing price
- Other options such as color, and whether to show/hide various lines.
PA-Adaptive MACD w/ Variety Levels [Loxx]PA-Adaptive MACD w/ Variety Levels is a Phase Accumulation Adaptive MACD with both floating and quantile levels. This is tuned for Forex. You'll have to adjust the Phase Accumulation Cycle settings to work for crypto and stock markets.
What is MACD?
Moving average convergence divergence ( MACD ) is a trend-following momentum indicator that shows the relationship between two moving averages of a security’s price. The MACD is calculated by subtracting the 26-period exponential moving average ( EMA ) from the 12-period EMA .
What is the Phase Accumulation Cycle?
The phase accumulation method of computing the dominant cycle is perhaps the easiest to comprehend. In this technique, we measure the phase at each sample by taking the arctangent of the ratio of the quadrature component to the in-phase component. A delta phase is generated by taking the difference of the phase between successive samples. At each sample we can then look backwards, adding up the delta phases.When the sum of the delta phases reaches 360 degrees, we must have passed through one full cycle, on average.The process is repeated for each new sample.
The phase accumulation method of cycle measurement always uses one full cycle’s worth of historical data.This is both an advantage and a disadvantage.The advantage is the lag in obtaining the answer scales directly with the cycle period.That is, the measurement of a short cycle period has less lag than the measurement of a longer cycle period. However, the number of samples used in making the measurement means the averaging period is variable with cycle period. longer averaging reduces the noise level compared to the signal.Therefore, shorter cycle periods necessarily have a higher out- put signal-to-noise ratio.
Included:
Zero-line and signal cross options for bar coloring, signals, and alerts
Alerts
Signals
Loxx's Expanded Source Types
4 moving average types
