Why are there dots instead of bars on my charts?

The broker provides us 4 pieces of information each update

a. Price
b. Number of contracts
c. Date and Time
d. Total volume

Dots are caused when the number of contracts (b) is extremely big. Say, 500 contracts. That will cause around 3 dots (500/168 = 2.97) on your 168.

Another common scenario is when the total volume suddenly jumps by 500 without a tallying number of contracts. An example below:

The 4 pieces of information below are
1. Price,
2. Number of contracts traded,
3. Date/Time of this trade
4. Total volume traded for the day so far.

Line 1: $1, 3, 10:30:01, 50000
Line 3: $1, 3, 10:30:02, 50500

What the broker should have sent is

Line 1: $1, 3, 10:30:01, 50000
Line 2: $1, 497, 10:30:01, 50497
Line 3: $1, 3, 10:30:02, 50500

In such a scenario, VXCharts is able to detect the missing line 2 and will inject the 497 missing contracts to bring your volume charts inline with the broker's total volume. Unfortunately this will also produce dots on your charts.

Dots are very common during rollover periods.

Dots may also occur if you have an unstable internet connection. This can be verified by looking at DataServ to see if there any reconnection messages. As real time data will be lost during a disconnection, VXCharts will inject the missing data as dots until a reconnection occurs. You can check if the dots on your charts tally with the disconnection timings,

If they match, you should try to find out why the disconnection occurred.