If you’ve added MQ PowerLines to your chart and you still don’t see any power lines, it’s probably due to incorrect settings for the market you’re showing.
The most likely input that needs to be adjusted is the Tick Range input. What is Tick Range? When MQ PowerLines looks back at previous pivots, it tries to identify pivots that are close enough in price to the most recent pivot's price. Tick Range is the number of ticks that a pivot must be within to be considered close enough so that a line is drawn.
The default setting is two ticks (four ticks on some platforms), which might be great for a market like Crude Futures, as two ticks of the range are equivalent to $20. But a tick is equivalent to 1 cent in a stock. So two ticks in a stock is just 2 cents. That means that by default, a previous pivot high must be within 2 cents to count as close enough so that a line is drawn to connect them. If it doesn’t find a pivot within 2 cents, it won’t draw a line.
If you increase TickRange to 100 for a stock, that will be $1 (100 1-cent ticks), which may be a better value for equities like AAPL. Of course, equities vary in price quite a bit. Amazon was trading at almost $3000/share when this article was written, so even 100 ticks might not be enough to give a sufficient number of detections. 500 ($5 in stocks), or even higher, may provide the right amount of detections for higher-priced stocks.
You may find that 4% or 5% of the price is a good starting point, but it will vary based on how an individual stock responds. That is, some markets revisit an exact price quite often, and a market that does that may warrant a smaller tick range. Feel free to experiment.
Automating TickRange in TradeStation
If you only use equities and indices on TradeStation, you can use a formula for the value of TickRange so it doesn't need to be adjusted for each market. TradeStation allows you to specify the closing price, for example, as part of the input. If we set TickRange to 0.04*Close then it will automatically adjust TickRange to be 4% of the closing price for each market, and even over time in the same market. This may not work well for some markets, like Futures, but it's worth trying if you want an automatic adjustment to be made.
The other two inputs in MQ PowerLines are Length and BarsPast. Length determines how many past bars will be examined to look for previous pivots. BarsPast determines how many bars a detection line will continue to be shown beyond the rightmost pivot. SwHigStrength and SwLoStrength identify how "strong" a pivot must be, referring to the number of bars to the left and right that must be lower than a bullish pivot high (higher than a bearish pivot low) for it to be recognized as a valid pivot. The larger the strength, the more bars a pivot must stand out compared to nearby bars. ResistanceColor and SupportColor allows the specification of the respective resistance and support lines drawn on detection.
Dave has some documents in his live trading room "room drive" that provide some example settings. The content of that document has been included here to provide some additional samples. Note however that this is a snapshot in time (2018), and stocks change their prices gradually over time, and more abruptly with splits, so take note of the prices that are listed by each stock as that's one of the key factors that determine how far apart to allow pivots to be considered matching at price. A suggested formula for determining the TickRange for equities is also included. Those files are MQ Powerlines Stocks and Options Tick Calculator June 2018.pdf and MQ Powerlines Stocks and Options Tick Calculator June 2018.xls.
Stock | Price | SwHiStr | SwLoStr | TickRange | BarsPast | Length |
standard | $$Price | 4 | 4 | For Equities: ($$ Price x 0.25%)x100 |
25-50 | 50-75 |
SPX | $2,782 | 4 | 4 | 695 | 40 | 60 |
SPY | $278 | 4 | 4 | 70 | 40 | 60 |
QQQ | $175 | 4 | 4 | 44 | 40 | 60 |
IWM | $165 | 4 | 4 | 41 | 40 | 60 |
DIA | $253 | 4 | 4 | 63 | 40 | 60 |
AAPL | $191 | 4 | 4 | 48 | 50 | 50 |
GOOGL | $1,142 | 4 | 4 | 286 | 50 | 50 |
AMZN | $1,690 | 4 | 4 | 423 | 50 | 50 |
FB | $191 | 4 | 4 | 48 | 50 | 50 |
MSFT | $101 | 4 | 4 | 25 | 50 | 50 |
TSLA | $333 | 4 | 4 | 83 | 50 | 50 |
NFLX | $362 | 4 | 4 | 91 | 50 | 50 |
BKNG | $2,125 | 4 | 4 | 531 | 50 | 50 |
BIDU | $270 | 4 | 4 | 68 | 50 | 50 |
BABA | $206 | 4 | 4 | 52 | 50 | 50 |
CMG | $470 | 4 | 4 | 118 | 50 | 50 |
NVDA | $260 | 4 | 4 | 65 | 50 | 50 |
BIIB | $306 | 4 | 4 | 77 | 50 | 50 |
GS | $234 | 4 | 4 | 59 | 40 | 60 |
JPM | $111 | 4 | 4 | 28 | 40 | 60 |
BLK | $550 | 4 | 4 | 138 | 40 | 60 |
COST | $205 | 4 | 4 | 51 | 40 | 60 |
DIS | $104 | 4 | 4 | 26 | 40 | 60 |
NKE | $75 | 4 | 4 | 19 | 40 | 60 |
Notes: | ||||||
Tick Range - create's the "looseness" of the powerline, more strictness = slightly fewer lines | ||||||
- for numbers >100, you can round up/down to nearest 10's | ||||||
BarPast - identifies the length of the powerline drawn on the chart, assists in "seeing" the line | ||||||
Length - the max distance between pivots that identify the powerline |
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