TradingView Review 2023: Is It the Best Stock Charting Tool? (2024)

TradingView is a powerful charting system for traders and investors of all experience levels. On top of that, it has a social network where people share ideas, custom scripts to enhance charts, and set up topic-based chats to discuss their views.

With a professional commercial data feed, it is possible to analyze prices, volume, and historic asset prices with ease. Furthermore, company fundamentals data is also available, allowing us to screen through them and follow companies that match our criteria.

TradingView is designed for technical analysis but can be useful to any investor.

Who Is It For?

Charting can be intimidating. When I first started looking into charts, I was overwhelmed… It took me a while to understand what all the different bits meant and how to make use of those. I needed something that would get me started, and would allow me to improve my skills as I improved.

TradingView acted exactly like that.

I see TradingView as a useful tool for both novice and experienced traders. It supports a wide range of asset classes, from stocks to crypto, amongst others.

Long-term investors often dismiss technical analysis and therefore might be of the opinion that tools like TradingView won’t be helpful to them. However, I think it’s still worth considering using it since you could take advantage of some degree of technical analysis in order to:

• Choose a good entry point for your investment, since it can really make a difference in your returns in the future;
• Choose appropriate stop-loss amounts for your investment, in line with your risk appetite;
• Understand the long-term trends of each asset you’re thinking of buying, to make sure you’re not investing in a business that has been declining heavily for a number of years.

Those 3 points alone will make you a better investor and therefore avoid basic mistakes. While TradingView is primarily a technical analysis tool it still has quite a bit to offer the fundamental analyst.

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What Do I Get With TradingView?

TradingView is packed with features. I’m highlighting only the top features on offer, but check out more details on theirwebsite.

Charting

This is where you will spend most of your time. At first glance, TradingView’s charts look simple. Don’t let that fool you. Once you input a specific asset name or ticker into their search bar and select it, the initial graph is just a quick overview. You need to click on their “Full-featured chart” button in order to get access to all its features.

Here is what it looks like:

There is a lot to unpack here. The default graph is a candle graph. It comes with the trading volume at the bottom by default, though you can add more indicators to it.

The free plan only allows one indicator, but with the other plans, you can add more. Check out their pricingto find out more.

At the top, we can pick the type of graph we want to see, the time intervals, indicators, alerts, and financial data. These are the basic tools for us to analyze the graph. I would like to highlight their indicators’ functionality. Besides the dozens of built-in indicators, you can also access indicators created by the community, and see the underlying scripts. This community aspect is a great way to learn how other more experienced traders have created their indicators, and what they are good for.

Now back to the previous image above. On the left-hand side are tools you can use to enhance a graph with annotations. That could be a trend line, a text note, a Fibonacci retracement, etc. There are dozens of useful annotations you can use.

On the right-hand side, we can build and access a watch list of assets, set up alerts, see raw data, and observe community features such as ideas shared by others, public and private chats, etc. There is also real-time news on each of the selected tickers, and a preview of its fundamentals and technical analysis.

Finally, at the bottom, we can access the stock screener, test trading strategies, and connect our broker account with TradingView, so that we can buy/sell assets from it.

As a reference point, my absolute basic chart layout includes volume indicators,MACD,RSI,accumulation/distribution,and the 50-daymoving average. Here is how it looks:

Sometimes, though, we want to see more than one chart at the same time. It might be because we want to look at different timeframes or compare charts of different assets.

Having separate tabs isn’t really practical, and it’s somewhat discouraged by TradingView since they limit the number of allowed tabs open. But fear not, TradingView allows a split-screen with up to 8 charts in one window. However, that might not make sense if your screen size is small, but with a large enough external monitor, it can be handy to keep an eye on several charts at the same time.

It took me a while to discover this feature, but it’s definitely a bit plus for me.

Screeners

We all know a few stocks or cryptocurrencies by heart, right? In TradingView, we can manually look for them, but ultimately we need a tool to filter through the thousands of assets out there based on our criteria. This is what screeners do.

TradingView comes with 3 screeners: stocks, forex, and cryptocurrencies. The stock filter also allows us to choose ETFs on top of common and preferred stocks, which not all screeners do.

There are endless filtering options. The top-level filter is the country, which impacts the exchanges we use. Then, besides the traditional filters on fundamental data, like market capitalization, for example, there are filters based on technical indicators too. We could filter stocks with an oversold RSI indicator, as an example, if we’re looking for a sign of a potential rebound.

Screeners also include TradingView’s rating, which varies from strong sell to strong buy. Those ratings are measured based on a number of technical indicators and are very prominent in the technical details section of individual stocks. More on this in the technical analysis section below.

Finally, we can also choose from dozens and dozens of column types, which again enhances the data with pretty much every information we need. It’s possible to either use their table interface or alternatively download the resulting screener data as a CSV.

Overall, I find the screeners quite powerful, especially when combined with the chart view for quick access.

Server-Side Alerts

So now you’re following a bunch of assets, like stocks. That’s great but equally stressful. How do we keep track of all those support and resistance levels? What if we turn around and miss a good buy opportunity?

TradingView solves this with server-side alerts. With this feature, we can set up price alerts on individual assets and get notified on any of their platforms when the current price hits that defined amount.

Each alert is highly configurable. We can:

• Setup on-off alerts or recurring ones;
• Choose a specific price or a % move;
• Set up a webhook and have an external application act on it too, but that might require some development effort.

I use alerts all the time, in particular when I identified specific entry or exit points.

However, be mindful that all plans have a hard limit on the number of alerts you can set up, and until when they will last.

Ideas and Community

Did you ever feel like you would like to double-check your assumptions with someone more experienced, in order to validate them? Or check what others are using in their technical analysis?

The best way to improve is by learning with others. TradingView allows us to do that via theirIdeasfeature. It is a way for us to share our assumptions with other traders, and get feedback from them. We can also explore literally thousands of ideas from other traders and investors, and learn from them. If their ideas are consistently playing out as they expect, you got yourself a mentor you can learn from.

This was key when I started trading. I read books and did some rudimentary analysis, but I missed a lot of nuances that made my trades less successful. The practical aspect of it was important, and to see what others did too. I needed a community of traders to learn from.

Besides technical analysis, ideas in TradingView can be used for other purposes. It’s possible to create ideas around risk management, trading plans, short/long positions, and so on. Each asset has top authors and top ideas associated with them, which makes it easier to choose whom to follow for the best content. Here is an example:

Despite this being a great tool, it has its drawbacks as well. On one hand, it’s great to have access to millions of other traders and investors and learn from their ideas and chats. But on the other hand, the curation is not quite up-to-scratch, meaning you’ll find a few trolls along the way.

This is actually an aspect I think TradingView should improve because it can be such a powerful tool for people to learn how to use technical analysis in their favor. So far, I have managed to ignore trolls and other users that actively mislead with their ideas, but it takes some knowledge to be able to differentiate between a genuine idea and one that’s not worth looking into.

Scripts

The default indicators are not enough for you, you say? Then, this feature is for you. TradingView developed its own scripting language, calledPine Script, that allows us to create custom indicators and plot them in our charts.

Since TradingView focuses on the social aspect of trading, you can also share your custom-built indicators with the community and get feedback on them. When looking for indicators in the full-featured chart page, you will see both the built-in ones and the ones created by the community, in the public library.

I haven’t tried this feature myself, but I’ve used custom-built indicators by other traders.

Markets

With TradingView, we have access to a broad set of market data on stocks, futures, commodities, forex, CFDs, and cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin. Most of the major indices are covered and there are over 50+ exchanges and data feeds available for us to slice into custom time intervals as needed. On top of that, TradingView also exposes fundamental and economic data, which is quite useful to investors.

Here is an example widget that shows data on several different markets and indexes:

The market data is pretty comprehensive and I haven’t seen anything glaringly missing.

Broker Integrations

Be mindful that TradingView is not a trading platform per se. They do support a number of brokers that you can connect to it in order to perform buy/sell orders, but if your broker is not supported, you might not be able to perform live trading on the platform.

As of September 2021, these are the brokers supported. As you can see, many of the most popular online brokers are not on the list, meaning that you cannot (yet) directly integrate them with Tradingview.

• TradeStation
• OANDA
• FOREXcom
• FXCM
• Alpaca
• Gemini
• AMP
• CQGFCMs (full list)
• iBroker
• Saxo Group
• Tradovate
• HitBTC
• WH Selfinvest
• Alor
• IronBeam
• Tiger Brokers
• Capitalcom
• Currencycom
• Chaka
• Tickmill
• Global Prime.

Fundamentals

Even though TradingView is more geared towards technical analysis, it also includes a number of features and data on company fundamentals.

Their data enables insights into how companies are doing beyond just their stock price.

It is also possible to plot fundamental data on any chart, which allows investors to chart relevant financial data against stock prices and do their analysis. In practical terms, that means it’s possible to see, in a chart, the correlation between metrics like revenue and stock price.

Technical Indicator Gauge

Technical analysis is at the core of what TradingView offers. For every ticker, they keep track of several oscillators, moving averages, and pivots. That, together with timeframes, allows them to offer a quick preview of each company’s stock price.

They are then able to display real-time ratings for the selected timeframes for each asset. Those ratings are Strong Sell, Sell, Neutral, Buy, and Strong Buy.

They use several moving averages, both simple and exponential, and oscillators such as the Relative Strength Index (RSI), MACD, Stochastic %K, amongst others.

A Look Into TradingView’s Competitors

There are lots of competitor charting tools out there, probably starting with your broker’s systems. But not all charting tools are created equal.

Most competitors fall into two categories: application-based tools and web-based tools. I have split them into two because their feature set and pricing models differ quite substantially, and it’s easier to understand the differences this way.

Application-Based Tools

In this category, most competitors are not web-based, meaning they require the user to install an application on the computer in order to trade. Here is how they compare:

Unless you’re trading something very specific like FOREX, or have any special needs that TradingView doesn’t support, I would recommend you choose TradingView. The cost of the other systems can be orders of magnitude higher than TradingView.

Web-Based Tools

In the list below, I’m comparing web-based applications with TradingView. This is a more like-for-like comparison:

As you can see from the table above, TrendSpider is the tool that comes closer, closely followed by Finviz and then Stockcharts.

If you want to learn more about Finviz, here is our comprehensive review.

Also worth mentioning is Yahoo! Finance, which is free for the most part and includes lots of information on fundamentals, but also has an advanced charting capacity for technical analysis. It’s a good way to get started, but definitely not as feature-rich as its competitors.

TradingView Pricing

While the basic features of TradingView are free to use, they do offer three upgrade plans for advanced users: Pro, Pro+, and Premium.

It’s great that they have a free version. It allows people to look around and see what their product can offer. However, it’s quite limited and I wouldn’t be able to use it for any serious trading.

Then, the two pro plans: Pro and Pro+. The main difference between those is the number of things you can use. For example, with Pro+, you can use TradingView on more devices, save more chart layouts, use more indicators per chart, more alerts, etc.

Finally, the Premium plan includes absolutely everything. Up to 25 indicators per chart, up to 8 charts in one window, 400 server-side alerts, second-based intervals, and much more.

The annual fee is cheaper than the monthly fee, which is pretty standard, and both the pro and pro+ look very reasonably priced given what the tool enables us to do.

Final Thoughts on TradingView

TradingView has been an essential tool in my toolbox. I don’t trade through it, because my broker isn’t supported, but its superior features allow me to do all my analysis before I execute orders on my broker’s website. It is reliable, comprehensive, and has most of what I need day-to-day when trading.

Given the relatively low price, I think this is a no-brainer, despite the few issues I highlighted above.

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FAQs

Here are a number of FAQs that summarize some of the points made throughout this article.