Interdax · Follow
Published in · 9 min read · May 12, 2020
Every cryptocurrency trader should know these tips for the most popular charting platform.
TradingView is the most popular web-based platform and is the default platform that is incorporated across cryptocurrency exchanges such as Interdax.
In this article, we want to share 13 tips with you to help you to make the most of TradingView, make charting easier for you and provide insights into features that some traders may be unaware of.
1. Customise Your Chart
To customise your chart, click on the settings button on the lower right-hand side.
The settings menu will then appear and you’ll be able to change the colour of the candlesticks, scales, background or timezone.
2. Follow Asset Ideas
It’s well known that TradingView is a social charting platform where you can follow other trader’s ideas. But you can also follow all ideas for a particular trading pair.
For example, you can follow all ideas for BTC-USD quoted by a particular exchange. Any time someone uses that exchange’s price to create an idea, you’ll get an alert in your Ideas Stream. This can be useful for gauging what other traders are thinking and to analyse sentiment.
Suppose you want to follow ideas about bitcoin, search for a relevant ticker you want to receive alerts about and then click on ‘Follow BTC-USD’.
The analysis published by other traders about BTC-USD will then appear in your Ideas Stream (the lightbulb icon on the right-hand side).
You might want to follow more than one BTC-USD pair on the most popular exchanges to see more ideas about bitcoin.
3. Watchlists
The watchlist summarizes the markets you are interested in and actively trade. You can also list assets in a particular order.
Watchlists are useful for cryptocurrency traders because of there are often price deviations across exchanges for certain coins and you may want to compile a list of quotes from these exchanges for the same pair, e.g. BTC-USD. Also, some traders want to track both the USD and BTC price of an altcoin and may order their list in this way.
See below on how to add ETH-BTC to a watchlist.
Type the ticker into the box, select the pair you want, and it will be added to your watchlist:
Watchlists can be categorised for different asset classes (cryptocurrency, stocks, foreign currencies, etc.), mid-cap versus high-cap altcoins, derivatives versus spot markets, and so on.
To create a new watchlist, click on Create New List and give it a name. Below you can see we’ve called it ‘altcoins’.
You can then add tickers to the new list as usual.
4. Magnet Mode
Magnet mode makes drawing support/resistance, trend lines and so on much more easier and quicker. It’s an alternative to checking lows/high, typing the numbers in and then drawing a trend line.
Once you enable magnet mode, any line you draw on the chart will automatically connect to the Open-High-Low-Close of the nearest candle, as shown below:
By default, extend trend line is not activated. To extend the trend line, click on settings, go to Style and then check both of the boxes to Extend for the left and right sides.
Magnet mode also makes plotting Fibonacci retracements, Gann fans, Pitchforks, and other charting tools much easier:
5. Draw Support and Resistance Zones
To draw support and resistance zones, instead of just lines, you can use the parallel channel tool.
The channel can be modified to include a line for the support (or resistance level) in the middle.
Click on settings, then check the boxes next to Middle, Extend left and Extend right:
6. Shortcuts
The same shortcuts used to cut, copy and paste in word processing applications such as Google Docs can also be used in TradingView.
Other shortcuts include:
- Alt + T (or ⌥ + T on Mac) to start drawing a trend line,
- Alt + F to start drawing the Fibonacci tool (or ⌥ + F on Mac),
- , + 15 to switch the timeframe to a 15-minute chart (or , + 30 for the 30-minute chart, , + 1H for the 1-hour chart, and so on).
The screenshot below shows all the shortcuts for indicators/drawings:
7. Save Chart Layouts
Using the cloud button on the toolbar at the top, you can save your chart layout. This saves you from having to put all your indicators on the chart every time you go onto TradingView.
You can use the Ctrl + S (or ⌘ + S) shortcut to save a layout.
You may also want to save chart layouts to save time. For example, if you’re using different trading systems for many trading pairs. Or you want to look at different techniques on the same pair to provide confirmation. You can save the chart layout so you don’t have to add or remove the indicators each time.
Suppose you want to trade with two systems: 1) Bill Williams indicators and 2) the Bollinger Bands system.
First, add the indicators for the Bollinger Bands system to the chart. Click the cloud button on the top toolbar.
Once you rename the layout, it will automatically save (or you can save from the menu):
To switch between layouts, click on the menu, then load new layout.
Once you’ve clicked on the layout you want, it will appear in a new tab in your browser:
Even if you log off your computer or close your browser, you can quickly pull your charts up with all of the indicators that are part of your trading system.
8. Multiple Timeframes on One Chart
Instead of different indicators on the same chart using the saved layouts, day traders and scalpers may also want to monitor multiple timeframes at once.
To view more than one timeframe, click on the select layout button and select the double screen for two charts:
Depending on what TradingView plan you are on, it’s possible to display up to 16 different timeframes at once.
9. Make Lines Visible Only on Certain Timeframes
Suppose you draw important levels on the 4-hour timeframe, but don’t want them to clutter your daily, weekly or monthly charts.
You can specify on which timeframes trend lines, support/resistance zones and other chart tools are visible on.
To do this, click on the object, go to the Visibility settings. Uncheck the boxes for the timeframes you do not want the lines to appear on.
When switching to the daily chart, only the level at $10,520.50 is visible:
For example, the 4-hour chart above shows an important daily level at $10,520.50. Some other important levels on the 4-hour timeframe are on the chart as well.
To prevent these levels from appearing on the daily chart (and higher timeframes), we can specify that these levels will only be visible on 4-hour chart (and lower timeframes).
The important levels that were marked out on the 4-hour chart are no longer visible on the daily chart.
10. Quickly Calculate Your Risk-Reward Ratio
Two useful drawing tools that you should be aware of allows you to place long or short positions on the chart.
You can use it to effortlessly calculate your risk-reward ratio:
Once plotted, you can click on the settings and enter the entry price, the exit price and the take profit level.
This allows you to visualise your trade. The drawing tool will tell you the percentage change, expected profit and risk-reward ratio.
The settings can also be adjusted to ensure that you only risk a certain percentage of your account on each trade.
For instance, if you had an account of $100,000 and you wanted to specify the risk of each trade to be 1%, the risk-reward tool will adjust the stop loss to ensure that you are only risking $1,000 on the trade.
11. Set Price Alerts
To save you from sitting around all day staring at charts, there’s also an alert system on TradingView.
The shortcut for creating alerts is Alt + A (⌥ + A for Mac users).
You can also opt to get an email so you can monitor your alerts on your smartphone in case you’re away from your computer.
12. Customise a Toolbar Menu with Your Favourite Drawing Tools
There’s a trick to create a toolbar with your favourite drawing tools and save it each time you log onto Interdax.
Click on the star next to the drawing tool and it will appear in a new toolbar:
You can also favourite certain timeframes and chart styles so they stay on the interface and you can easily switch between them (which is useful if you’re switching between timeframes to analyse the market or monitor different positions you have open).
Changing the chart type is more fluid and ensures that you always have the same toolbar options whenever you use the platform.
13. Custom Indicators
To find and use custom indicators, go to the Indicators button and then ‘Public Library’.
Scroll through (or search for) custom indicators created by other traders:
Some custom indicators are created specifically to trade bitcoin and analyse cryptocurrency markets. Some examples include custom indicators that track on-chain fundamentals like daily active addresses, transaction value, the Network-Value-to-Transactions signal indicator, and so on.
By searching the user’s TradingView name and indicator on Google, the first result displays more details such as the pine script, explanations on how to use the indicator or how it is constructed and comments by others. Pine scripts are used to create custom indicators in TradingView and we’ll explore this further in a future article.
Is there something that you want to know about TradingView or that we missed here? Ask us in the comments section below.
Disclaimer: This blog post is for informational purposes only and should not be taken as financial advice.
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