I’m not seeing power lines on my chart? How can I fix this?

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 for this is 4 ticks, which might be great for a market like Crude Futures, as 4 ticks of range is equivalent to $40. But a tick is equivalent to 1 cent in a stock. So 4 ticks in a stock is just 4 cents. That means that by default, a previous pivot high must be within 4 cents to count as close enough so that a line is drawn to connect them.  If it doesn’t find a pivot within 4 cents, it won’t draw a line.

If you increase Tick Range to 100 for a stock, that will be $1 (100 1-cent ticks), and that may be a better value for equities like AAPL. Of course, equities vary in price quite a bit. E.g., Amazon was trading at almost $3000/share at the time that this article was written, so even 100 ticks might not be enough to give a sufficient number of detections. Perhaps 500 (which is $5 in stocks), or even higher, might provide the right amount of detections for higher-priced stocks.

You may find that 4% or 5% of 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.

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 allow specification of the respective resistance and support lines that are drawn on detection.

Dave has some documents in his live trading room "room drive" that provides 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.