Tradingview Guide
Tradingview Guide
and Demand
Guide To
Tradin
g View (2021 Update)
By [Link]
© Copyright: [Link] 2021
Are you tired of losing money
My Forex mentor once told me:
However, in the past few years, one platform has climbed to the top…
I’m talking about Tradingview, ring a bell?
It’s easy to use, packed with amazing features not found on most other
platforms, and best of all, completely FREE.
Today I’m going to give you a complete walk-through of how to use Tradingview along with its
many features.
You don’t download any separate programs onto your PC, or sign up to a broker.
You simply enter the website into your device and
then log in to start viewing charts and carrying out
analysis.
Simply put,
Tradingview has the best features of any charting platform,
and yes, that includes MT4.
right?
The features are extensive, and being built directly into the platform means
you can access them from anywhere, including the chart screen.
Keep in mind, while Tradingview is free to use, you need to open a free account for the full range of
features. With no account, you can only access a select few features. And after a while, around 15 minutes,
a pop-up will cover the screen telling you to either create a free account or become a pro member to
continue viewing charts. The ads still show with a free account, but that doesn’t stop you from doing
analysis.
So to open an account, head over to the site…
Easy!
While a free account with Tradingview gives you many cool features, a pro account really takes things up a
notch. It provides specialized tools that make trading and analysis so much easier. Many of these, like the
strategy tester and market replay tools, cost money to use on other sites, so it’s pretty good value for money
when you break it down.
Check this comparison on the Tradingview site for a more detailed breakdown of the features that come
with each different account type.
Important Note: Not sure if Tradingview is for you? Get the free trial…
Tradingview gives all users a 1-month-free trial to test the platform and try out all of its features. All the
pro and pro + features are included, and you have full access to the paid tools I talk about later in this
guide.
Understanding The Chart Window
So, when you first open Tradingview, either with or without a paid account, you’ll find yourself on the
chart window. Tradingview’s pride and joy is here.
The chart window shows the price of a currency/stock/commodity through a chart and contains all the tools,
indicators, and options you can use in your analysis. Suffice it to say, this is the place you’ll be spending
most of your time.
Now for all you beginners out there, this screen probably looks like a mess of different options and
tools. That’s what I thought when I first started using it, and I’m sure that’s what many of you think right
now. Don’t worry. While it looks complicated at first, once you know a few things, the chart window is
much simpler than it seems.
The window contains four different tabs, each I have marked with an arrow.
These tabs contain all the options for viewing charts and conducting analysis. From here, you can add
indicators, switch between different pairs (or other assets), add lines and rectangles. This is good for
supply and demand trading. You can also view information on the price of a currency and news around the
world.
Important Note: Unlike other online charting sites, you don’t need to manually save your analysis every
time you use Tradingview. Everything gets saved to the cloud automatically as you carry out your
analysis. So, whenever you re-open the site and login, your charts remain the same as you left them.
Before we get to that, however, let me show you how to set your charts up, ready for
trading. We only need to change a couple of things here, so it shouldn’t take too long.
First of all, you want to change the chart type to a candlestick.
By default, Tradingview displays a line chart. While this comes in handy in certain situations, like quickly
finding S & R levels, for normal analysis, it doesn’t give us enough information about the price. So switch
it over to a candlestick chart to get a better idea of what price is up to.
With that out of the way, it’s time to adjust the chart
As many of you know, I’m a HUGE fan big round number levels: prices that end in 500 and
0000. For my money, they create some of the strongest support and resistance levels in the
market.
Many of the biggest reversals begin after price touches or comes close to these levels.
Finding these levels doesn’t take long, but marking each one on the right price gets old… fast.
By changing the “Horz Grid Lines” setting in the appearance tab to black, or whatever colour you like,
the chart will automatically mark every big round number level for you, removing the need to mark them.
I’ll talk more about this next point later , but you can also connect your broker/exchange to Tradingview
and trade directly from the chart. In other words, you can place, close, and manage trades directly from the
chart window, without going back and forth between Tradingview and your broker.
As it says:
this shows important economic news on the chart
via a small circle with a flag and number.
The circles show the time of the announcement, and
the number tells you how many events are set to be released.
Click the circle to get a small description of each event, and its predicted impact.
It doesn’t show every release, as Forex Factory does,
so it is best to keep that calendar open somewhere;
but, all of the important ones will show on the chart at their respective times.
Over the next few sections, I’m going to run through all the different features and tools on Tradingview and
show you how they work. I’ll explain each setting and tool in the four menus mentioned earlier and give you
my thoughts on what to use them for and which are actually useful. By the end, you should have a pretty
good idea of how to set up and use Tradingview for yourself.
Top Menu
We’ll start with the top bar menu, or main menu as I like to call
it. Your first port of call after opening a currency pair.
This menu contains all the important options for changing the chart.
Change the time-frame, select a different pair, and switch between chart types all from within this menu.
The top-bar menu contains 18 different options, all of which I have labelled
above. Don’t worry, you won’t need to change or use all of these when you trade.
However, it is important to understand what each one
does, so you know how to use the charts properly.
Before we cover the options, find all of your account settings inside the “Profile” tab (1).
Click this to reveal a drop-down menu with all the settings for your account.
Save your current chart layout, sign out, sharing on (or off) is done from this menu.
When you first open a chart, head over to the “Pair Select”, (GBP/USD in the
image) and switch to your favoured pair.
Most pairs have multiple broker/exchange pricing as well, so you can see the price of a pair for a specific
exchange/broker. Just look to the right and it will say Oanda, FXCM, IG, etc. next to the pair.
At some point, you will probably want to switch to a different time frame.
To do this, click the 1-hour button to the right (3).
All of the key short, medium and long-term time frames you need in trading are here,
including many you don’t tend to see on other platforms. It even has one-second charts, for all you
scalpers out there.
To set this up, scroll down until you see the “Add” button:
Enter the interval period and the time scale and then click “Add”
to add the time frame to the list and switch over to it on the chart.
Click the little bar icon to change the chart type, like I showed earlier.
Tradingview has a few interesting chart types here, like the Renko and Kagi;
but, the candlestick works best for price action, so stick to that.
You probably won’t use this next tool often, but it’s still useful in certain situations.
“Compare” lets you compare the price of two currencies,
or any other assets if you like, against one another.
There are a few different ways you can use this,
but I mainly use it to quickly see how different
pairs and assets correlate to each other.
Normally, you have to flick back and forth between pairs to see how they
correlate. With this tool, however, you just place the correlated pair on the chart,
its price gets overlayed on top of the other pair,
making it easy to see how they move and correlate to each other.
You can also view the price in a graph at the bottom, rather than the “overlay” on
top, if you want to keep your chart nice and clean.
To set this up, just de-select “Overlay” inside the compare menu.
“Indicators” contains all the technical indicators Tradingview provides, and it provides A
TON. You won’t be short of indicators here, that’s for sure.
All the basic indicators we know and love are featured and
Tradingview also has an exhaustive collection of custom indicators created by the community.
Open up the tab, and you’ll see four mini tabs, each containing a different set of tools and indicators.
Find the most common indicators under “Built In’s” at the top.
MACD, Moving Averages, Relative Strength Index, all feature here,
along with all your other favourites.
Important Note:
Need to change the settings of an indicator?
Right click the line (or graph, depending on indicator) and hit the “Settings” button.
A small menu with all the settings will pop open.
What you can change depends on the indicator, but all the important stuff is supported.
“Financials” shows important figures about a stock (earnings, debt, cash flow, etc). It plots the release
of each figure in a separate graph below the chart to make it easy to see how it has changed over time.
If you trade or invest in stocks, you’ll know how important fundamental analysis is,
so this tab makes it really easy to see how the fundamentals are changing over time.
Do you hate re-applying your studies (indicators, financials, etc) every time you open a new chart?
Hit the “Templates” button to save your current chart layout as a template.
Select this whenever you open a new chart to instantly have all your studies re-applied
with your saved settings.
Three default templates with the most popular tools and indicators are available,
but it’s better to create your own in my opinion: more customizable, you know.
Note: You can only save 1 template using the free version of Tradingview, so choose wisely.
“Alerts” allow you to, yep, you guessed it… set alerts. Who would’ve thought!
Tradingview has a HUGE range of options for setting and customizing alerts,
some of which you can see above.
Set alerts: when support and resistance levels get hit, when news events come out, set them for when
indicators cross or hit a certain number. You can even get the alerts sent to your phone or email, so you
never miss a beat when out and about!
Note: SMS alerts require a paid account, but for email, it’s completely
free. Setting an alert is easy, but there are two ways to do it.
The first (and easier) way is to right-click the price, technical indicator, or level on which you want to set the
alert and click the “Add Alert” button from the menu.
Tradingview will set the alert for you at that point.
The other way is to open up the Alerts tab and manually enter all the information
yourself. You can view all your open alerts by hitting the alarm clock icon in the right
menu.
Before we move on and look at the right side of the menu, we have the “Market Replay” button.
A Pro-account-only feature this.
Market replay lets you rewind the market and play it back in real-time, just like a video.
I often use this to look back at old trades to see
what went right, or wrong, and how I could improve.
Note: The Undo and Re-Do buttons (11) let you correct mistakes, just like
You won’t use these five options much, but nonetheless, they let you do some cool things worth
knowing about.
If you want to change the layout of the chart, for example, to have one currency next to the other or a
different time frame shown alongside another time frame, click the little square button (12).
Tradingview supports multiple layout types, but you need the paid version to access them all.
To the right of the square, it says “Unnamed” with a little down arrow next to
it. Use this to save your current chart: all the indicators, lines, drawings, tools,
etc. Tradingview saves all your charts to the cloud, hence the icon.
You can quickly switch between them.
Simply click the little arrow to save and load up your charts.
The small “Cog” button opens the chart settings menu, which I showed you earlier.
With “Publish,” you can upload your analysis to Tradingview for everyone to
see. Hit the button to bring up the idea window.
Enter your idea or headline for the analysis
e.g “EUR/USD Breaking To New
Highs,” then write a description of what
you think
is going to happen in the small text box below.
Once approved, Tradingview will publish your analysis on the Ideas page for that pair.
Side Menu
Probably the part of the chart you will be using the most. The side menu shows all the important options for
drawing on the chart like: lines, rectangles, shapes, Fibonacci studies, etc. There are some other cool tools
exclusive to Tradingview.
Lots of options to go through here, so let’s jump right in.
Speaking of lines…
At some point, you will no doubt want to put some support or resistance levels or trend-lines on the chart.
If you don’t, what the hell are you doing on a price-action site?
Tradingview has all sorts of lines and channels for your needs.
To access them, head over to the line tab below the crosshair selector.
Pretty much every line type is supported, so rest assured, your favourites will be here.
Some aren’t quite as useful as the others: flat top/bottom, anyone?
It is nice to see options, but...
Tradingview goes the extra mile and adds ones we probably wouldn’t use
or otherwise know about in our trading.
Quick Tip:
Hold “Ctrl” while clicking a line or any other drawing on the chart to instantly make a copy.
This is handy if you quickly need to mark a bunch of support and resistances levels
or supply and demand zones.
For all you supply and demand traders, this next tab is a must…
Shapes contains all the shape-drawing tools Tradingview provides, and yes,
that includes rectangles for Supply & Demand zones.
Circles, curves, triangles, and arcs are also available.
And if those don’t tickle your fancy, select the brush tool to draw a freehand
Remember:
You need a free account with Tradingview for the analysis to stay on the chart.
With no account, your analysis vanishes once you close the site or select a different
Here’s a handy, little tool for all you pattern traders out there.
The patterns tab beneath text contains a bunch of tools for marking chart patterns.
Marking chart patterns gets pretty annoying,
especially complex patterns like Gartley, ABC’s and the like.
With these tools, however, you can quickly mark them without much difficulty.
At first glance, the Time and Prediction tab seems nothing out of the ordinary…
just another tab with some cool tools. However, inside is one of the most useful tools
Tradingview provides…
What it does is take the afore-mentioned info and show it on the chart visually, via
lines. When you move the lines up and down,
your risk-to-reward ratio, current profit & loss,
profit target, and stop-loss price show above the
line,
making it easy for you to quickly see what it is and how it’s changing.
Amazing, right?
Remember, you need to use the correct tool for the right trade
type. Don’t use the long position tool when you have a short trade
open, as the levels won’t show in the right place.
Also, you must enter your account balance and trade size into the settings menu for the tool to show the right
information. To do this, simply right click the tool, select “Settings”, then enter the information. Click the
“Style” and “Visibility” tabs to change the colours of the tool and what time frames it shows on
Only a few different options here; so let’s quickly buzz through them.
The magnifying glass below the ruler lets you zoom in and out of the chart.
You can do this with your mouse wheel, so it’s kind of unnecessary.
Note: Hold shift and drag your mouse as a quick shortcut for the measurement tool.
With the Magnet you can snap objects (lines, rectangles, etc)
to the nearest candlesticks OHLC (open, high, low, close).
It sounds useful, but in practice, it tends to make the cursor stick to everything,
so best to keep it un-selected.
The next two tools,
“Lock All Drawing Tools” and “Stay In Drawing Mode”,
don’t do anything important, so just leave these
unchecked.
If the chart gets too crowded with lines, zones, retracements, and the like,
click the little eye to hide everything.
Click it again to bring it back.
The star button opens up the favourites menu, which shows your favourite tools.
The objects tree button, at the bottom, shows a list of all the drawings and indicators on the chart.
You can individually hide, delete, and edit each indicator and drawing from this menu.
Important Note:
Click the little star next to a tool to save it as a favourite.
Your favourite tools will appear in a separate toolbar
on the chart so you can easily switch between them when trading.
Right Menu
The right side menu shows important information about your
pair. The three tabs (black box) show news about the currency,
info about its price and lets you create your own watch-list.
The far-right side (red box) has a bunch of buttons for opening new tabs,
most of which are social features, but a few useful ones for trading too.
Perfect if you always focus on the same few pairs or track the same set of stocks.
Simply click a currency to instantly switch over to it with all your prior analysis in-tact on the chart.
The default watchlist only shows the top-performing assets for each sector,
so you’ll need to remove each one to create your own.
Easy!
Like all the tabs on the right menu, you can re-size the watch-list box to make it smaller or
wider. Just click one of the edges and then drag inwards or outwards to re-size the box to your
liking.
You can create and save as many watch-lists as you want, but you must have a pro account to save more
than one. To manage all your watch-lists, hit the watch-list button at the top.
Open this to save, load, and name your different watch-lists.
Your default watch-list will always be called “Default”.
Not that useful for us PA traders, but hey, still cool to have.
Finally, we have the headlines tab.
What do you think this does?
As it says, this tab shows news headlines about the pair from around the world.
A bunch of different Forex sites are used as sources here,
so you tend to get a good mix of both current and future information.
Unlike the buttons we’ve already looked at, you probably won’t use these
much. Most of these bring up tabs related to the social aspects of Tradingview,
like the chat window where you can interact with other traders,
or the messages tab, where you can see messages people have sent.
I won’t bore you and go through everything here,
I’ll just detail the main buttons you should know about and might want to use.
I’ve labelled each of the key, useful, buttons above with a small box
and I’ve placed a box around the social buttons.
It’s pretty obvious what these do, so I’ll let you figure them out for
However, another way to see upcoming news is to open up the calendar (green box).
Just like Forex factory, Tradingview has a fully functioning economic calendar
that shows all upcoming news events along with their predicted impact on the price.
If you decide to connect your broker to Tradingview to trade directly through the chart,
more on this in a minute, the order panel (black box) is where you can place and view open orders.
I haven’t got my broker connected, so the options don’t show
here. But once it’s set up, all your options for placing,
closing and managing open trades and orders show inside this tab.
Bottom Menu
The bottom menu contains some of the best tools on Tradingview. These tools, some of which you have
to pay for on other sites, will save you a huge amount time and make your trading life a whole lot easier.
Stock/Forex/Crypto Screener
For Forex traders, knowing which pair to trade usually comes down to personal preference.
We have our favourite pairs, and we usually stick to them
while occasionally dabbling into other pairs from time to time,
depending on what’s happening and what opportunities have arisen.
As a result, the traders usually have to trudge through hundreds of stocks and cryptos
to find the right ones to trade, which is:
#1 quite annoying, and
#2 takes up a lot of precious trading time.
If you want to screen out whole groups of stocks and currencies, click the box above.
You can screen according to time frame too; but, this is a paid-only feature, so you’ll need the pro version
of Tradingview for access.
Text Notes:And just when you think Tradingview couldn’t get any better, it throws a full-fledged text
editor into the mix. Take that MT4!
The notes tab allows you to keep well… notes.
Create small notes and save them to look back at
later.
I sometimes use this to keep little reminders on what price is up to, in case I need to get something down
quickly. But, you could use it to keep a trading plan or even your own personal trading diary. All your notes
get saved to the cloud, so you don’t have to worry that they’ll get deleted every time you leave the site.
It’s no “Microsoft word,” but hey, gets the job done, right?
Pine Editor
You can even send your created indicator or trading strategy over to Tradingview for verification.
If it passes, Tradingview will put it in the custom indicators folder for everyone else to see and
use. How about that, aye?
Note:
Tradingview has some pretty stringent quality guidelines your indicator/strategy must
meet, so make sure you read them carefully before sending it over.
Strategy Tester
Tradingview knows how important testing is, so in addition to all their other
features, they have also implemented a full-fledged strategy tester (also FREE)
that allows you to test strategies to see all sorts of data about their performance.
Considering it’s a free tool, this tester is surprisingly in-depth.
The tester shows all the important information through a simple window at the bottom.
Look here to see:
net profit, max total draw-down,
Sharpe ratio, winning trades vs losing trades,
average risk to reward ratio among other important stuff.
Trading Panel
All you MT4 stans will be kicking yourself over this tool.
It’s one of the few legit things MT4 has over most other charting platforms.
Flicking back and forth between your broker and charting platform gets really annoying,
but on Tradingview, it’s not a problem.
Like MT4, you can connect your broker to trade directly through the chart screen.
Just head over to the trading panel, find your broker or exchange and hook it up to your account.
Once connected, right click anywhere on the screen
and select “trade” to place a trade at that price.
You can then manage the trade through the trade menu at the bottom.
Admittedly, the list of supported brokers isn’t that big, which might pose problem for some of you.
However, all the top brokers and exchanges – Oanda, FXCM, IG etc –
are all fully integrated, so you shouldn’t have too many issues.
How To Set Your Charts Up Like Mine
Ask any professional trader, and they’ll say the same thing:
“the way you set up your charts plays just as much a role
In whether or not you make money
as your trading strategy and
risk management skills.”
Now I’m going to show you how to set them up for real.
These changes are mainly small things that get rid of unnecessary information.
You know, like the shtuf that tells us shtuff we don’t need to see.
However, set your charts any way you like;
but, make sure to always use the default settings I explained at the beginning.
Because of this,
I always remove the watch-list, details, and headlines tabs
from the right-hand side of the chart window.
These three tabs give us great information, no doubt;
But, most of it isn’t necessary to have on the screen when we’re trading.
So it just takes up valuable chart space.
If you want to bring it all back, you easily do so by clicking the button in the top right.
Unless it’s to aid in price-based decision making, indicators have NO PLACE on your
chart. Keep them OFF.
A disclaimer… If you know how to use volume, DO NOT remove it from your charts.
My volume skills really aren’t up to scratch, that’s why I leave it off. If you’re one of those volume guys who
knows it like the back of your hand, keep it on, as it will help you understand price better.
To change the colour, head over to the Appearance menu in chart settings
(right-click somewhere on the chart to open the menu) and change the chart colour to white.
It’ll take some time to really learn all of the ins and outs of how to use the platform. It took me a good few
weeks, coming from MT4. With this guide, you should pick it up in no time. And if you do have any
trouble, just let me know below or shoot me an email and I’ll help you out.
It’s a great way to see some of the additional features Tradingivew provides without putting any money
down. This is what convinced me to get a pro account back in the day.
Just remember, the trial will automatically switch to a paid account after the 30 days is over. So make
sure you end it by then, otherwise, you might get a surprise the next time you check your bank account.
Q 2: Is Tradingview A Broker?
It’s easy to get this mixed up, so I had to put it on the list.
Tradingview is a charting platform, not a broker. It does have broker integration, however. Just head over
to the Trade tab at the bottom like I showed earlier, select your broker from the list (get the full list here),
and then hook it up to your Tradingview account.
You can now trade directly through the Tradingview chart screen without having to go back and
forth between the site and your broker.
Pretty cool, eh?
Easy.
Cheers,
PAN