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 a previous pivots, it tries to identify pivots that are close enough in price to the most recent pivot. 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 in an equity, a tick is equivalent to 1 cent. 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, 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), might provide the right amount of detections.

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.