TradingView Review - Are These the Best Stock Charts? (2024)

About TradingView

TradingView is browser-based financial markets charting and analysis platform for traders and investors. It is a powerful and flexible platform with a ton of features, including social media integration and a built-in community of traders. Its cloud-based technology enables users to access the platform from any computer or mobile device, making it portable and powerful. The platform is amazingly flexible, covering global equities, futures, and forex markets. This is possibly the best browser-based charting platform currently on the market in terms of function and value.

Is the platform right for you? Keep reading our TradingView review to find out.

Co-founded by Stan Bokov in 2011, the platform offered free browser-based charting tools to grow the site from 2,000 daily visitors to a 15 million worldwide user base. The community has now grown to over 30 million registered users. This growth has been spurred by the genius widget-apps placed on various high traffic blog sites like Investopedia. Unlike other communities that converse on opinions, rumors, spam, and so-called fundamentals, TradingView is based almost solely on technical analysis and charting tools. This tends to weed out the pump and dumpers and spammers, thankfully. You can also follow some of the best technicians, which is nice for building your own trading strategies.

TradingView Pricing

It is free to set up a TradingView account with limited access and delayed quotes to kick the tires. However, the free account won’t work for intra-day traders who need real-time quotes and the ability to save charts with technical indicators and tools on them. TradingView offers three levels of paid subscriptions. All subscriptions come with a 30-day trial period. The PRO plan is $14.95 per month or $155 per year. This plan allows for two charts per layout on a single device with five indicators per chart and five saved charts.

The Pro+ plan is $29.95 per month or $299 per year. This plan allows four charts per layout on two simultaneous devices with 10 indicators per chart and 10 saved chart layouts. It also adds the ability to apply indicators on top of indicators and offers intraday spread charts. The Premium plan is $59.95 per month or $599 per year. It allows eight charts per layout on five devices simultaneously, with 25 indictors per chart and unlimited saved chart layouts. It also offers price alerts that never expire.

Paid plans also offer better customer support. Customer support levels range from regular to priority to first priority as you move up the pricing tiers. While it isn’t entirely clear what these customer support levels entail, it’s interesting to see that support varies by plan.

It’s also important to note that paid plans don’t include real-time price data for most exchanges. So, you’ll also need to pay monthly exchange fees. All plans support extended hours trading.

TradingView Platform Features

TradingView started off as just a charting platform, but it has continued to add features regularly. It has grown into a full-fledged community of technical traders and investors featuring instant messaging streams per market and much more. Here’s a rundown of the key features.

Range of Markets

You can use TradingView to analyze much more than just stock prices. The platform also includes charting for dozens of currency pairs, hundreds of cryptocurrencies, futures, bonds, and more. The platform offers paper trading for all of these assets, making it useful for active traders who want to break into trading new asset classes.

Stock Charts

The TradingView charts are still our favorite aspect of the platform. TradingView has everything from basic candlestick and bar charts to Heikin Ashi and Renko charts (chart types vary by subscription plan). Paid users also get trading volume profile charts. The charting tools are extremely well-designed, highly customizable, and easy to use.

Users have a lot of options when it comes to chart layouts and chart data. Each browser window can feature up to eight individual chart windows based on the user’s subscription plan. Each of the charts can be linked to the same or different time intervals or the same symbol on custom time intervals. The charts can also be expanded or shrunken and easily resized just by left-clicking in the window and dragging. The “auto” button on the lower right side of the chart will autoscale the chart to smooth it out for the selected time period in the chart window. This is a very useful tool, especially when you have a lot of indicators on the chart.

The drawing tools are vast and impressive, to say the least. They provide everything from harmonic pattern plotting to Elliott Waves to pitchforks and more. The best part about the drawing tools is that they are saved to your chart and can be accessed at any time.

Other noteworthy charting features in TradingView include a playback feature that lets you review how the price history played out from a specific date to the present. There’s also a countdown timer that let you know how much time is left for the current candle to close. Very often, you can see how the algos will sweep the bids or asks to “paint” a bullish or bearish candle right before it closes.

TradingView charting is hands down the best online charting option available right now for active traders.

Technical Indicators

The platform has a TON of indicators, including all the ones you’d expect to find built-in. That includes moving averages, stochastics, MACD, RSI, CCI, Pivot Points, and more. What’s especially neat is that you can apply indicators on indicators. So, for example, you can take a a moving average of the RSI to smooth it out.

If TradingView doesn’t already have the indicators you need, you can create your own indicators using the Pine script editor. This is TradingView’s own scripting language, which is pretty straightforward once you get the hang of it. You can also get indicators and trading strategies from other experienced traders on the platform. TradingView has a library of community-contributed indicators, which you can use as they are or as the basis for coding your own custom indicator.

Depending on which plan you are subscribed to, you can have up to 25 indicators per chart.

Automated Technical Analysis

TradingView recently launched an automated technical analysis tool similar to the one Barchart offers. The tool uses a variety of technical criteria to determine whether a stock is a buy or a sell.

Here’s an example of one of the analyses:

What we like about this tool is that it allows you to switch between timeframes. You can choose to analyze a stock using intraday timeframes, daily timeframes, weekly timeframes, and monthly timeframes. The introduction of time into this analysis makes the results more accurate. For example, a stock may breakdown intraday while still holding strong on the daily chart. Traders can use these different timeframes to align the analysis with their personal trading styles.

Of course, like its manual counterpart, automated technical analysis is not a foolproof system. First, technical analysis doesn’t factor in fundamental data, market conditions, or company news. Second, technical analysis is a speculative art that is difficult to automate with accuracy. That said, TradingView’s automated analysis is an interesting feature. It can be a helpful starting point for your own analysis, or it can serve as a way to automate some of your own analysis processes.

TradingView’s automated analysis isn’t using any proprietary algorithm. It uses basic rules of technical analysis. For example, a stock trading above its 200-day moving average would be considered bullish in the long-term. TradingView’s automation can compute this on the fly.

Here are the indicators the analysis uses:

See Also

2024 TradingView Review • 4.5 Overall Rating • Benzinga

Market News

The news feed is basically pulled from various websites, including YAHOO! Finance, TheStreet, Motley Fool, and Briefing.com. There isn’t a dedicated scrolling real-time newsfeed, so news-based momentum traders are out of luck here. Most of the news is headlines that open up in a separate browser window when clicked.

Stock Scanner

The stock screener is pretty basic here. You can scan based on fundamental metrics, including valuation metrics like price/earnings, dividends, margins, and analyst ratings. This is very generic and provides basic information. If you’re looking for a more advanced free scanner, you may consider FinViz. Traders looking for a standalone real-time stock scanner may consider Trade Ideas.

That said, the TradingView stock screener can be helpful for coming up with trade ideas that can be analyzed directly within the TradingView platform. The biggest value of the TradingView screener is that you can click through the results and analyze charts quickly and efficiently within TradingView. While there are better scanners out there, TradingView’s charts are unrivaled, so this is particularly useful for technical traders.

Stock Alerts

TradingView allows users to set price alerts on your chart. It’s just a matter of right-clicking on one chart at the price level you want for your alert – so it’s very convenient. It also allows you to set up multiple alerts based on indicators and drawing tools. You can even use the Pine script editor to create more alerts.

The alerts are actually very impressive and useful, especially for technical traders who regularly comb through dozens of charts. Alerts are not limited to price. You can set alerts for a variety of conditions. Some of the most unique/useful ones include:

• Trendline breaks
• Price crossing a moving average
• Moving average crossovers (i.e. 50-day SMA crosses 200-day SMA)
• Movement within or out of price channels
• And more

Alert notifications can be sent:

• In-browser
• In-app
• Via email
• Via SMS

Order Entry/Compatible Brokers

TradingView allows you to link supported online brokerage accounts to place trades. Popular broker integrations include TradeStation, Tradovate, Gemini, and Oanda. You can find the full list of brokers here.

TradingView also supports simulated trading for stocks, forex, and crypto. You’re free to reset your paper trading account at any time.

Watchlists

Watchlists are one of the more basic features within TradingView, although they’re quite essential. You can create as many watch lists as you need.

Like a few other stock discovery and monitoring tools in the platform, the biggest value of the watchlist feature is that it allows traders to comb through a list of stocks and analyze charts efficiently.

Customization and Saved Layouts

Charts and layouts are saved on the cloud, which makes them accessible from any device.

You can build, save, and load multiple chart layouts. For example, you may have an intraday layout and a swing trading layout or one layout for your desktop and another for your mobile device.

Everything about the charts is fully customizable, including:

• Colors
• Font sizes
• Indicators
• Chart types
• Annotations
• Price Scales
• And more

Social Trading

One other important feature of TradingView is its built-in social network. TradingView allows users to share trade ideas through annotated charts and commentary. This is one of the best attempts at social trading that we’ve seen. Whereas StockTwits quickly became reminiscent of old stock market message boards, TradingView actually has something new to offer for the experienced trader.

Users can share their trading ideas and tag them by symbol so all ideas come up when you search for a ticker. You can also check the credibility of a user based on a “reputation” metric that is unique to the TradingView platform. It’s also possible for other users to “like” ideas, and the number of likes can serve as a rough proxy for quality. While you should never assign too much weight too other people’s trading ideas, it is definitely convenient to be able to review the analyses of other traders.

Platform Differentiators

TradingView can’t be beaten in terms of value and features. It’s one of the best platforms for day trading that we’ve seen. And at $19.95-$59.95 per month plus exchange fees, TradingView is a great value. Comparable platforms can cost upwards of $200 a month.

Another major benefit of the TradingView platform is that it works with a broad range of markets. You can use the platform’s trading tools for stocks, currencies, cryptocurrencies, futures, bonds, and more.

Check out some of our in-depth TradingView comparisons if you want to see how the platforms compare:

• TradingView vs. FinViz
• TradingView vs. Trade Ideas
• TradingView vs. StockCharts.com
• TradingView vs. Thinkorswim
• TradingView vs. TrendSpider
• TradingView vs. TC2000

What Type of Trader Is TradingView Best For?

This platform is for traders and investors who primarily favor technical analysis. We can’t stress enough how versatile TradingView’s charts are. They offer everything from indicators on indicators to bar replay to a paper trading simulator. The Pine script editor and community-contributed indicators make this one of the most customizable charting platforms around. The features are simply amazing and we haven’t found another platform that offers so much for so little money.

Is TradingView Premium Worth It?

TradingView is one of the few online charting platforms that offer a feature-rich free version. Most traders are likely to discover TradingView while looking for free charts.

There’s no doubt that the free version of TradingView is worth it. You get access to tons of powerful tools for free – it’s a no brainer.

As part of our TradingView review, we wanted to help users decide whether or not a premium plan is worth it. So, should you pay for a TradingView subscription?

The short answer is – it depends. If you already have access to a standalone trading platform like DAS Trader or ETRADE Pro, it may not be worth it to pay for another charting service. On the other hand, if you’re looking for a comprehensive platform for day trading or short-term investing, then TradingView offers a ton of value. At the end of the day, TradingView has a lot of great tools, but the real star of the service is definitely the charting.

If you are looking for an excellent charting platform that stores your charts on the cloud, TradingView premium services are an excellent choice. We recommend starting with the free version and upgrading as you hit limitations. Honestly, TradingView is one of the few platforms we’ve reviewed where the free version is almosttoo good. For many users, the free version is adequate, and there is no reason to upgrade to the paid version.

That said, the paid versions are absolutely worth it if you need access to real-time data, extended trading hours, more indicators per chart, and other advanced features.

Simply put, we recommend starting with the free version and upgrading to the paid version if you hit a limitation. Rest assured, upgrading to the premium version is well worth it.

TradingView FAQs

Below are answers to some common questions about TradingView, some of which have already been covered in our review (e get it, some readers like to skim).