Icy-Hot Visual Indicator [SciQua.com]

📈 Icy-Hot Visual Indicator [SciQua.com]
The Icy-Hot Visual Indicator is a powerful, fully customizable chart enhancement tool that overlays color-coded gradients directly onto your price candles and chart background, providing immediate visual cues about market dynamics based on your preferred inputs and normalization style.

Tip: Ensure that you've moved the indicator to the front in order for the candles to show up.

Created by SciQua.com, this tool is designed for traders who want clear, real-time visual feedback on price strength, momentum, or volatility — without cluttering their charts with noisy signals.

🔍Key Features
🔹Dual Visual Layers:
🔹Candle Gradient Coloring
Colors the candle bodies and wicks using a smooth 3-color gradient based on a normalized, smoothed price-based value (or any source input).
🔹Background Gradient Layer
Adds a semi-transparent gradient overlay to the chart background for deeper visual context, such as trend zones, strength areas, or volatility states.

🔹Customizable Normalization & Smoothing:
Both the Bar Source and Background Source layers allow you to select how values are processed:
🔹Source Type Options:
🔹bounded: Normalizes values within a fixed min-max window.
🔹unbounded: Allows values to expand naturally over time.
🔹zscore: Uses statistical z-score normalization.

🔹Smoothing Options (12+ types):
🔹Choose from EMA, SMA, WMA, RMA, TEMA, VWMA, HMA, DEMA, Median, Gaussian, LinReg, ExpReg, and more. This ensures a smooth yet responsive gradient flow.

🔹 Full Gradient Control:
🔹Choose three colors for each layer: Low, Mid, and High values.
🔹Optionally reverse the gradient, allowing you to match the indicator’s behavior to your strategy or aesthetic preference.

⚙️ Inputs Summary
🟦 Bar Color Settings:
🔹Bar Source: Any price-based input (e.g., close, hl2, volume)
🔹Source Type: Normalization method (bounded, unbounded, score)
🔹Smoothing: Type and period of smoothing
🔹Gradient Colors: Customize low → mid → high range
🔹Reverse Gradient: Inverts visual order

🟨 Background Color Settings:
🔹Identical flexibility and customization as bar settings, applied to background.

🧠 How It Works
Under the hood, this script imports utility functions from a private module (JoshuaDanford/SciQua) to perform advanced smoothing, normalization, and gradient rendering. It uses these to compute two values:
🔹barValue: Drives the candle gradient
🔹bgValue: Drives the background shading

Each is dynamically calculated from user inputs and then fed into a visually rich 3-stop gradient function.

📌 Use Cases
🔹Quickly visualize market strength and trend transitions
🔹Highlight volatility spikes or momentum shifts
🔹Enhance visual clarity for discretionary trading
🔹Use background gradients to spot broader trends while monitoring price bars for entry/exit cues

Examples of How to Use It:
🎚️ Volume-Based Visualization
Set the source to volume to see volume spikes and fading participation visualized directly in your candles or background.

📉 RSI or Custom Oscillator Inputs
Apply the gradient to an rsi(close, 14) or any custom oscillator to highlight overbought/oversold zones visually.

📈 Smoothed EMA Trends
Use a smoothed moving average as the input to show subtle trend accelerations or flattening phases in color.

🧪 External Scripts or Indicators
If you’re using a separate indicator script on your chart, simply reference that output in the source input to color candles based on your custom strategy logic.