TradingView Review 2024: The Ultimate Technical Analysis Platform?

In this TradingView review, we will uncover the secrets behind its 50 million-strong global trading community.

What makes TradingView the most popular investing website in the world? Even more popular than internet giants CNN and BBC?!

Our in-depth testing reveals a combination of broad data coverage, advanced charting, powerful screening, robust backtesting, practical community tools, user-friendliness, and great value for money are responsible for this.

Follow along to get the inside scoop from a former hedge fund manager, as we get to the bottom of TradingView’s magic formula… Not to mention how you can claim up to a 50% discount!

TradingView Review Highlights

What is TradingView?

TradingView is a popular charting and stock screening platform for traders, boasting over 50 million users globally.

And it’s easy to see why.

It offers real-time market data across a broad range of assets, covering 70+ stock exchanges in over 50 countries, including stocks, ETFs, FX, Crypto, and Futures.

What’s more, it has an incredibly comprehensive suite of analytical features, ranging from in-depth charting tools, stock screening, backtesting, and fundamental data. Oh yeah, and it’s all packed into a slick, user-friendly platform.

Now, I know what you’re thinking… this is going to be expensive, right?

Nope.

The reason TradingView is so popular, is because it provides these services at a ridiculously low cost. If you want to find out just how cheap, then keep reading.

TradingView Pricing

TradingView offers four different subscription plans, ranging from a basic free version to an all-inclusive premium plan.

Below is a breakdown of the features available in each…

TradingView Free Plan

By signing up for a free TradingView account, you gain very limited access to most of its tools. However, bear in mind that it is ad-supported. This includes the following:

• 1 chart per tab & 1 saved chart layout
• 7 years of annual financial data on charts
• 3 indicators per chart
• Backtesting
• Candlestick pattern recognition
• Automated Fibonacci retracements
• Multi time frame analysis
• 5 active price alerts & 1 indicator alert (2 month duration)
• Stock screener with manual refresh (daily/weekly/monthly time frames)
• Paper trading & live trading through selected brokers
• Fundamental data, economic data, news & earnings calendars
• 1 watchlist
• Mobile app access

Essentially, the free plan is useful for beginners to take a look around the platform and get a feel for it. However, you will quickly realize that you are constrained with the level of analysis you can perform. Also, the ads are quite frustrating.

If you really want to unlock the full potential of TradingView, including real-time data, broader charting capabilities, multi time frame screening, more alerts, watchlists, customer support, and trading community access, you will have to upgrade to one of the paid plans.

TradingView Pro

TradingView Pro is the cheapest of the paid plans and removes many of the limitations in the free plan, including:

• No ads
• 2 charts per tab & 5 saved chart layouts
• Custom range bars
• Bar replay on intraday bars
• 20 years of annual financial data on charts
• 5 indicators per chart
• 20 active price alerts & indicator alerts (2 month duration)
• Multi time frame screening with auto refresh
• Real-time data from 70+ global exchanges for extra fee
• Social community access
• Infinite watchlists
• Customer support

For such a reasonable price, the extra flexibility afforded to you by the Pro plan is definitely worth it in my view.

TradingView Pro+

Pro+ is the next level up and offers even more flexibility than the Pro plan.

• 4 charts per tab & 10 saved chart layouts
• Intraday Renko, Kagi, Line Break, Point & Figure charts
• Intraday spread charts based on custom formulas
• Export chart data
• 10 indicators per chart
• 100 active price alerts & indicator alerts (2 month duration)
• Priority customer support

Pro+ is better suited for serious technical analysts and active traders who desire more flexibility with intraday price data.

TradingView Premium

TradingView Premium is the top of the range subscription level and comes with unlimited functionality.

• 8 charts per tab & unlimited saved chart layouts
• Second-based intervals (1/5/15/30 seconds)
• 25 indicators per chart
• Deep backtesting
• Chart pattern recognition (flags, pennants, head & shoulders, Elliott waves etc)
• 400 price alerts & indicator alerts (infinite duration)
• Real-time alerts
• First priority customer support

While Premium is a great choice for all traders, I would say it is principally designed for day traders who require real-time intraday price data and alerts, as well as chart pattern recognition.

TradingView 30-Day Free Trial

If you’re unsure which subscription plan is right for you, there is a 30-day free trial available for each tier.

This is more than enough time to get used to the platform and find out which level provides the right set of tools for your investment style.

TradingView Discounts

Firstly, by clicking any of the links in this article, you will receive a $15 credit after you purchase any TradingView plan.

Secondly, users who choose to pay annually rather than monthly receive a 16% discount, which is equivalent to 2 months free!

And last but not least, users on a 30-day free trial of any paid plan will receive an “Early Bird” offer with the following discounts:

• Pro – 30% off
• Pro+ – 40% off
• Premium – 50% off

Note, these discounts only apply to annual subscriptions.

Therefore to enjoy the biggest savings, you should start a 30-day free trial of the Premium service and take advantage of the -50% Early Bird offer by paying upfront for the whole year. This equates to $360 of savings a year compared to paying monthly!

TradingView Features

Now we’ve got our heads around the different subscription plans, let’s dig into the features that makes TradingView so popular.

TradingView Charts Review

TradingView is best known as a charting platform, so it is no surprise that it comes packed with extensive charting features.

Firstly, there are over 15 customizable chart formats to choose from, including:

• Bars, Candles, Hollow candles, Columns, Line, Line with markers
• Step line, Area, Baseline, High-low, Heikin Ashi 
• Renko, Line break , Kagi, Point & figure, Range (Pro, Pro+, Premium)

There are also around 17 pre-set time frames ranging from 1 minute bars all the way up to yearly bars. Note, paid subscribers can also set custom time intervals, and Premium members can choose second-based intervals (1/5/15/30 seconds).

Technical Indicators

You can also overlay your charts with an endless list of technical indicators, ranging from the more well-known such as the MACD or RSI, to the more obscure, such as Williams Fractals and Moon Phases.

However, the number of indicators you can apply to each chart depends on your subscription plan:

• Free: 3
• Pro: 5
• Pro+: 10
• Premium: 25

There are more than 100 indicators to choose from, providing one of the broadest suite of technical analysis tools in the industry. Below is just a snippet of these, however you can use this link to see the full list of indicators.

Users can even create their own custom indicators and strategies using TradingView’s native Pine Script programming language.

What I love about TradingView is how it lets you share your custom indicators with the rest of the community. In fact, there is public library of 100,000+ indicators for you to tap into, making it the largest repository of community-built scripts in the world.

As such, even if TradingView doesn’t already include a certain indicator, or you’re not comfortable programming, you will more than likely be able to find what you’re looking for.

One such example is the Rahul Mohindar Oscillator, which I explain how to use in this article. Admittedly, MetaStock offers a more complete version of this indicator, but it goes to show the breadth of indicators available in TradingView.

This is one of the biggest benefits of TradingView’s enormous community in my view, as it provides huge educational value and lets you take your trading strategies to the next level.

Multi Time Frame Charts

Another cool chart feature worth mentioning is multi time frame charts. As the name suggests, it lets you see different time frames on the same chart simultaneously, giving you a broader trading picture. This applies to both price data and any technical indicator you plot.

To add a higher time frame to your price chart, select the “Multi-Time Period Charts” option from the indicator menu.

This superimposes shaded boxes over the underlying price data, where each box represents 1 period on the higher time frame. Green boxes indicate prices rising over that time frame, while red boxes indicate prices going down.

For example, the primary time frame in the chart below is daily, whereas the secondary (higher) time frame is weekly. Each small candle represents 1 day, while each box represents 1 week. As you can see, 5 daily candles fit within 1 weekly box.

Ta-da! You are now looking at 2 different time frames on the same chart.

Unfortunately, the secondary time frame is chosen automatically for you according to the following rules:

• 1 day for any chart timeframes below 1 day
• 1 week for any timeframes starting from 1 day up to 1 week
• 1 month for any timeframes starting from 1 week up to 1 month
• 3 months for any timeframes starting from 1 month up to 3 months
• 12 months for any timeframes above 3 months

This removes a bit of flexibility, however I didn’t find it that restricting. Most of the time, you will only be interested in comparing 2 neighbouring time frames, anyway. Who wants to look at a yearly time frame on an hourly chart, for instance?!

Regardless, I’m pleased to say that the same restrictions don’t apply to technical indicators. For example, in the daily chart above, I plotted a weekly MACD and a monthly MACD in the 2 bottom windows.

As you can see, both are in a bullish trend, with the monthly MACD only recently generating a bullish crossover. This is incredibly useful information, as it may help you dismiss short-term sell signals as noise and hold onto your long positions for more profit.

To change the time frame of any technical indicator, simply click the settings button in the indicator legend and choose the desired time frame from the “Multi Timeframe” drop-down menu.

All in all, this feature helps you see longer term trends more clearly, while still looking at higher frequency data.

This is particularly beneficial for day traders, who often need to “zoom out” to see important technical levels on higher time frames. For example, they might want to plot daily moving averages on their 5 minute charts to avoid tunnel vision.

Drawing Tools

In addition to indicator overlays, there are also more than 90 drawing tools that you can annotate your charts with.

These include:

• Trendlines
• Channels
• Pitchforks
• Fibonacci Retracements
• Gann Fan
• Elliott Waves
• Chart Patterns (triangles, head & shoulders)
• And much more

It pretty much has every annotation tool that you could ever need as a technical analyst. However you choose to employ support and resistance levels, breakout points, or pivot levels, TradingView will almost certainly cater to your needs.

All of the drawing tools are conveniently located in the left side-bar.

Another standout feature for me is the automated Fibonacci retracements. Essentially, Tradingview uses sophisticated algorithms to detect the most relevant peaks and troughs in a trend to automatically plot Fibonacci levels. This not only removes the guesswork for you, but also saves you time manually plotting them yourself – leaving you more time to pick winners!

For those interested in this function, TrendSpider is another charting software that offers this feature. In fact, I show you how it compares in this TrendSpider vs TradingView review.

Candlestick Pattern Recognition

One of the latest features to TradingView is candlestick pattern recognition. Essentially, TradingView has the ability to display more than 40 candlestick patterns on your charts, including:

• Abandoned Baby
• Dragonfly Doji
• Engulfing
• Hammer
• Hanging Man
• Harami
• Spinning Top

It even displays multi-candle patterns like the evening doji star and morning doji star.

Simply click the “Indicators” button at the top of your chart and go to the “Patterns” tab under “Technicals”. Then scroll down until you find the section for candlestick patterns, where you can select the candlestick formations you want to see, or all of them!

As you can see, the candlesticks are marked by arrows, which are helpfully plotted either above the price data for bearish signals, or below the price data for bullish signals.

If you’re unsure what a certain candlestick pattern means or how to interpret it, simply hover over one of the arrows. This brings up a handy text box that defines the candle pattern for you as well as a possible trading interpretation.

All in all, this is a highly accurate, user-friendly candlestick recognizer that makes for a great TrendSpider alternative.

Chart Pattern Recognition

In addition to candlestick pattern recognition, TradingView also offers chart pattern recognition. However, while candlestick recognition is available to all users (including Free), chart pattern recognition is only available to Premium members.

There are 15 different chart patterns that TradingView is capable of detecting, including:

• Flag (Bullish/Bearish)
• Double Bottom/Top
• Triple Bottom/Top
• Elliott Wave
• Head & Shoulders (Regular/Inverse)
• Pennant (Bullish/Bearish)
• Triangles
• Rectangle
• Wedge (Rising/Falling)

Again, you find these in the “Patterns” tab of your indicator menu. As before, simply select the chart patterns you want TradingView to identify.

Having played around with this function extensively, I was slightly disappointed with its accuracy.

Firstly, the patterns it identifies are quite dubious in most cases. By this, I mean the drawings don’t really resemble the pattern they claim to represent. For example, in the chart below, I think it is a stretch to call the first two patterns a pennant and rising wedge, respectively. And you can only just get away with calling the third pattern a rising wedge, in my opinion.

Secondly, it seems to miss patterns that are obvious to the human eye. For example, in the chart below you can see where I have drawn an inverse head & shoulders manually. This was missed by TradingView’s pattern recognizer.

This is a relatively new feature, so there is every chance that TradingView will tweak their formulas to yield better results in the future. However, until then, I don’t think you can justify this as a premium feature.

I found the pattern recognition features in TrendSpider and Finviz to be far superior to TradingView. For those interested, you should also read this article on other TradingView alternatives.

Multiple Charts

While the free plan only allows users to display 1 chart at a time, the paid plans let you display multiple charts simultaneously. Pro lets you display 2, Pro+ lets you display 4, and Premium lets you display 8. Importantly, these can all show different securities, time frames, and technical indicators.

Paid subscribers using the desktop software can also organize their charts across multiple monitors, displaying different information on each screen.

TradingView Screeners

Screening is another core feature of the TradingView platform, with 3 different types of screeners available: stocks, Forex, and cryptocurrencies.

Paid subscribers can screen across multiple time frames, from 1 minute all the up to 1 month, and auto refresh their results every 10 seconds or 1 minute. Unfortunately, free members are constrained to daily, weekly, or monthly time frames and can only update results manually.

Stock Screener Review

The TradingView stock screener offers extensive data coverage with more than 220 descriptive, fundamental, and technical filters across 70+ global exchanges.

To begin with, there are more than 30 descriptive filters to help you narrow down your investment universe, based on:

• Symbol Type (Common, Preferred, ETF, Fund, REIT, ADR, etc.)
• Exchange
• Country
• Sector/Industry
• Market Capitalization
• Price
• Volume
• Pre/Post Market Data

The fundamental data includes more than 90 financial metrics across the main categories of valuation, growth, and profitability. This covers all of the standard ratios you’d expect, such as P/E, EPS growth, return on capital, and profit margins, while also including some more obscure metrics like number of employees and revenue per employee.

Lastly, there are over 100 technical filters to help you find stocks with the price action you’re after. This includes basic indicators such as the MACD, RSI, and new highs, as well as more sophisticated candlestick patterns and TradingView’s proprietary technical rating.

Whether you’re looking for growth stocks, value stocks, momentum or oversold stocks, TradingView almost certainly has you covered.

This is the great thing about having so much data at your disposal. It suits all types of traders and investors.

The only group of traders this perhaps doesn’t apply to are serious day traders, as stock screener results only refresh every 10 seconds. For instant stock scanning, I would recommend Scanz or Trade Ideas instead. My TradingView vs Trade Ideas review covers this in more detail.

Another cool feature to be aware of, is the ability to customize which data columns show alongside your stock screener results. This is great if you like doing some further “eye-balling” before deciding which stocks to drill down into for more research.

Not only that, but you can export the results into a CSV file, which allows for further data manipulation and quantitative analysis in Excel.

Having said all this, there are a few areas where this stock screener falls short in my opinion.

Firstly, the condition functions are pretty rigid. For instance, you can only set absolute ranges for the fundamental filters, such as “greater than this number” or “between these two numbers”. This always feels a bit arbitrary to me. I like being able to set relative conditions based on a stock’s percentile rank vs. other stocks. If this describes you as well, you should check out my TC2000 review and ChartMill review instead.

Also, there are only a handful of pre-built screens, which isn’t a lot compared to other platforms.

Forex Screener

The Forex screener covers 1833 currency pairs in total (including exotic pairs), with 49 major and minor pairs.

In terms of screening filters, you have all of the same technical indicators included in the stock screener. This means you can screen for currencies that are rising or falling, overbought or oversold, reaching new highs or lows, displaying extreme volatility, or generating any other technical signal, such as a moving average or MACD crossover.

Crypto Screener

As a relatively new asset class, there aren’t many platforms that facilitate crypto screening.

True to form, TradingView has quickly adapted to its users’ needs and developed quite a comprehensive crypto screener, in my view.

Firstly, there are more than 40,000 crypto pairs across 55 exchanges, including spot, futures, and perpetual contracts.

In addition, as well as the technical filters mentioned above, it also has crypto-specific filters such as fully diluted value (FDV) and coins in circulation. However, it excludes some other well-known crypto metrics such as total value locked (TVL), so there is still room for improvement.

Backtesting Trading Strategies

In the next part of this TradingView review, I want to cover the backtesting function.

Essentially, backtesting lets you see how different trading strategies would have performed on historical data.

While this is available to all users, your subscription level determines the amount of historical data you can use. Ideally, you want to use as much historical data as possible to ensure robust results, so this is something to consider before picking your payment plan.

Basic members can use 5000 historical bars, Pro and Pro+ members can use 10,000, while Premium members can use 20,000.

When it comes to backtesting a strategy, you have 3 options:

1. Test any of the 23 in-built strategies from TradingView
2. The thousands of strategies shared by fellow users
3. Or, you can program your own from scratch using the Pine Editor

For example, the chart below shows the backtest results from a EUR/USD Renko candle strategy created by another user.

Note, you can modify all sorts of parameters before running the test, including the indicator settings, order size, trading costs, margin, and the date range (though not always).

In just a few simple clicks, you get the following output from your backtest:

• Net Profit
• Number of Trades
• Percent Profitable
• Profit Factor
• Max Run-Up/Drawdown
• Average Trade Profit
• Average Trade Duration (# candles)
• And More

I really like the speed and simplicity of this backtester, not to mention the visual representation of the strategy. The equity line gives you a clear sense of the strategy’s efficacy, while the buy and sell signals on the chart give you a feel for how it works in practice.

However, one criticism I have, is that it’s not easy to sift through the thousands of pre-built strategies. While there are some categories to help narrow your focus, it still felt like an arduous trial and error process to find a strategy that works. If you don’t already know what you’re looking for, you could be there a while.

They really need to make it easier to filter strategies by performance or allow you to backtest multiple strategies on multiple securities at the same time, similar to MetaStock. This would save users enormous amounts of time. Obviously, this isn’t such a problem if you plan to code your own strategies.

TradingView Fundamentals

In addition to being a top-notch technical analysis platform, TradingView also has some cool fundamental features worth mentioning.

The first of these is the ability to view a wide range of financial data and metrics from FactSet. This includes:

• Financial Statements: The last 7 years/semi-annuals/quarters income, balance sheet, and cash flow statements (depending on reporting frequency of each country)
• Ratios: Key valuation, profitability, liquidity, and solvency ratios
• Dividends: Historical dividend trend
• Earnings: Historical & forecast earnings
• Revenue: Historical & forecast sales, plus business segment & country breakdown

Finviz offers similar financial data, however you get far more in TradingView vs Finviz.

For a platform generally known for its technical analysis features, I was pleasantly surprised with the breadth of fundamental data available. Personally, I think there is more than enough information to conduct decent fundamental analysis.

It doesn’t end there though.

As well as being able to view the raw data, you can also plot over 100 fundamental fields on your stock charts. This lets you see the evolution of certain metrics over time, and gives context to a company’s current situation relative to historical norms. In many cases, this data stretches back 20 years.

For example, the chart of Microsoft below shows that the P/FCF ratio has risen alongside the share price recently, and is back to its all-time highs. At the same time, its ROE has fallen while EPS estimates have risen only marginally. This could suggest that the share price is getting overvalued.

TradingView Alerts

As traders, we usually find ourselves monitoring multiple stocks at the same time. However, we don’t necessarily want to trade them right there and then.

Most of the time, we want to see certain price action before making a decision, such as an exact price target, or some other technical condition.

Thankfully, this is where TradingView’s server-side alerts come in handy.

These alerts trigger whenever a pre-defined technical event occurs and send a notification to you via email, SMS, or a visual pop-up on any device. Pro and Premium members can even receive webhook notifications.

What’s great about this feature is the versatility it offers. In particular, you can configure the following alert types:

• Real Time Price Alerts: Get notified when a specific price target is met
• Indicator Alerts: Build alerts based on any techincal indicator with conditions like “crossing up”, or “exiting channel”
• Strategy Alerts: Create an alert for a strategy and receive a notification whenever a strategy’s order is executed
• Drawing Alerts: Create alerts based on trendlines, channels, and other custom drawings

Note, the free version only allows you to set 1 alert, Pro allows 20, Pro+ allows 100, and Premium allows 400.

TradingView Community & Trade Ideas

It should go without saying that investing isn’t easy. Risking your own money on uncertain outcomes will always be an intimidating prospect.

Of course, reading books can mitigate some of this unease, but at some point you need to learn from fellow traders.

In other words, people who have skin in the game.

Speaking from experience as a former hedge fund trader, I wouldn’t have been half as successful without my mentor.

Thankfully, TradingView represents the biggest trading community in the world with over 50 million users. In fact, as of December 2023, TradingView is officially the most popular investing website in the world, with greater traffic than big-name brands like Nike, TripAdvisor, and Hulu.

Essentially, TradingView provides all of the means to connect, learn, and share trade ideas with experienced traders. This includes the following:

• Trade Ideas: An open forum of other traders’ predictions, market analysis, and general trade setups, presented through advanced charts, videos, playback buttons, and community feedback.
• Educational Ideas: Discuss trading psychology, risk management, and best practices on how to use certain tools and strategies.
• Live Streams: Pick the brains of popular streamers in real time through live trading and chat.
• Scripts: World’s largest curated repository (100,000+) of community-built indicators and strategies.

What I love is how all of this comes in various formats, ranging from long-form blog posts, videos, charts, live streams, instant messaging, and more.

It really is a hivemind.

The social element can’t be overlooked either.

People are just as happy to share their losers as they are their winners. In fact, TradingView forbids users from deleting ideas that didn’t pan out.

Not only does this make for amusing banter, but it also provides a valuable educational resource that we can all learn from. It also removes some of the loneliness that accompanies trading sometimes. I don’t know about you, but I always find it reassuring that I’m not the only one losing money!

TradingView Broker Integrations

While TradingView itself is not a trading platform, it does integrate with several brokers that allow in-platform trading.

A broker integration allows you to trade directly from your charts in TradingView, so you don’t have to keep switching across different platforms. Below is a list of approved brokers that TradingView connects with.

• Activtrades; Alor; Alpaca; AMP; Binance; BingX; Bitget; Bitstamp; BlackBull Markets; Capitalcom;
• City Index; Dhan; Dorman Trading; EasyMarkets; Eightcap; Finanzen.net zero; FOREXcom;
• FXCM; FXOpen; FYERS; Gemini; iBroker; Interactive Brokers; Info Yatirim; IronBeam; OANDA;
• OKX; Optimus Futures; Orama; Osmanli Yatirim; Paytm Money; Pepperstone; Phillip Nova; Saxo;
• Skilling; SpreadEX; StoneX; Tickmill; Timex; TradeStation; Tradier; Tradovate; Velocity; WH Selfinvest

As you can see, it supports a broad range of stock, Forex, and crypto brokers, however it excludes popular names such as eToro and RobinHood. Also, it doesn’t allow options trading like TC2000 does. For a closer look at how these 2 platforms stack up against each other, read my TC2000 vs TradingView comparison.

FAQs

TradingView Review Summary

Now that we’ve come to end of our TradingView review, what’s the verdict?

Well, firstly… the toolkit is exceptional.

It offers the broadest data coverage that I’ve come across, spanning multiple assets and geographies.

Not only that, but the charts are endlessly customizable with numerous drawing tools and the largest library of technical indicators in the world.

Also, what other platform combines technical and fundamental stock screening with crypto and Forex screening? I can’t think of any either.

Add to that the backtester, financial data, and in-platform trading, and you have one of the most complete financial market analysis platforms out there.

It’s actually baffling how much you get for your money.

However, for me, the real cornerstone of this platform is the scale of its enormous community. The network effects from having so many people sharing their thoughts – whether that be investment ideas, trading strategies, or educational content – brings so many benefits that you just can’t find anywhere else.

Having said this, I still think they could improve their chart pattern recognition for premium users, organize the community resources better, and allow more flexibility in the screener conditions.

However, this is just nit-picking if I’m honest. TradingView fully deserves its crown as the most popular investing website in the world.

Don’t believe me?

Claim a 30-day free trial via the link below to see what all the hype is about for yourself!