A Complete TradingView Tutorial for Beginner Traders (2024)

As one of the most technologically advanced financial markets, the cryptocurrency domain has been continuously growing into a monstrosity that now boasts over a trillion US dollars in value. Tools like tradingview automated trading using advanced bots and complex technical analysis based on sophisticated strategies are running rampant in the industry and force all retail traders to adopt new exciting instruments.

This complexity is the reason behind many failures of beginner retail traders who enter the market without any prior exposure to the ideas of blockchain and decentralized finance. You don’t have to be an expert on these things, but you should understand how things work and which instruments are the best for analyzing market situations at any given moment.

We decided to put together an overview of one of the most popular charting tools out there and create a comprehensive guide on how to use the TradingView app. Understand that proficiency in using this tool is insufficient to generate profits reliably. You still need to learn technical analysis and distinguish good strategies from bad ones.

What is TradingView?

Since the first time when people started exchanging goods, merchants needed a good way to represent price dynamics over a long period. Price history is an extremely useful tool for any businessman as it provides insights into periodic demand, buyers’ moods, and more.

The current widely used form of chart is the candle chart which shows average and peak prices at any chosen interval of time. It can be months or minutes depending on the preferences of viewers. While technology advanced considerably over the last century, we are still using the same principle that was invented by Japanese rice merchants at the beginning of the 20th century.

There are other ways to display market data. While the candle chart is the most popular, other visualization methods exist including bars, lines, columns, kagi, renko, and many others. However, most of them show the same information: the price dynamic over a specific period.

TradingView is a modern tool that takes this whole concept to the next level by making everything automated. You don’t need to draw lines and calculate anything. Just choose an asset and a source of data, and it will generate everything for you in real-time. Similar instruments existed before but they were used primarily by experienced retail traders or people who wanted to explore the world of Forex.

Today, TradingView is widely considered the best online charting tool with a massive catalog of analytical instruments, user-generated strategies, and complimentary features that make technical analysis useful and fun.

How do you read charts in TradingView?

A price chart is the main window of the TradingView platform. You will immediately look at an overwhelmingly complicated menu with a myriad of buttons situated in the top, left, and right menus. Despite the seeming complexity, the information is easily readable if you know what to look at.

The price chart is the centrepiece of the whole window and shows a dynamically changing array of candles. Let’s take a closer look at this chart and vivisect its parts:

• The vertical Y-axis of the graph is the price. It can be adjusted by holding “left-click” on the axis and moving the mouse up and down or by scrolling. The price range differs depending on the asset since different assets have different prices which may vary dramatically. For example, 1 BTC may cost over $18,000 while 1 ETH — just under $1,400.
• The horizontal X-axis is the time scale which can be adjusted just like the price axis. By default, local time is used and the scale can be manipulated exactly by changing the period. Usually, retail traders use set periods like 1, 3, 5, 15 minutes, 1, 2, 3, 4 hours, or even days and weeks.
• Candles represent the price dynamic. The body of a candle is made of opening and closing prices of assets at chosen periods. Tiny lines on top and bottom are called candlestick shadows and indicate the maximum and minimum prices asked during the same period. You can draw a line through the centres of these candlesticks to create a line showing you the average price.

TradingView has multiple tools that directly affect the displayed information. You can access them in the top menu. Here are the control elements of the top menu in order from left to right:

• Profile management. The icon that shows your picture and the first letter of your login name is the button that allows you to open the main website menu and change your profile settings.
• Symbol search is the asset selector that can be used to search for the desired asset as well as a data source for it. For example, you may type in “BTC” and look for multiple exchange options and pairings associated with Bitcoin.
• Time scale allows you to seamlessly switch between different standard periods. Note that you may customize the selection however you like.
• The chart type is the next button which allows you to switch between a variety of different forms of charts including renko, line, columns, and more.
• Indicators and templates give you access to a catalogue of analytical instruments widely used in technical analysis.
• Alerts are signals that will be triggered when something happens in the market. You can customize alerts to warn you about important events, price changes, indicators reaching certain values, and more.
• Replay allows you to inspect the price chart retrospectively and test various strategies before applying them to the real world.

By learning these tools, you will quickly understand how to use TradingView charts to extract valuable information about prices.

How do beginners use Tradeview?

The best reason to start using TradingView is to learn more about technical analysis. It is a free practice environment that provides essential tools that can be exceptionally useful in your investment activities. For example, learning how to use Fibonacci retracement on TradingView charts is a great way to master one of the most commonly used price prediction techniques.

The left-most menu of the TradingView terminal has a selection of graphical tools that do not provide any dynamic information like indicators but can be extremely useful on their own. Here are the most important buttons in the left menu:

• Line drawing including simple lines, curved lines, and Fibonacci retracements. These are commonly used by analysts to predict future support and resistance levels for assets.
• Prediction and measurement tools allow traders to gauge the potential dynamic when placing orders and pick optimal take-profit and stop-loss points.
• Technical analysis patterns are special graphical overlays that allow traders to do a whole lot of different things including predicting reversals, determining future support and resistance levels, and more.

Let’s talk about how to use TradingView charts for technical analysis using the Fib retracement tool. A Fibonacci retracement is a technique that uses two extremities on the graph to predict potential support and resistance prices for any given asset. Significant price points are represented by lines which are usually separated by Fibonacci sequence numbers expressed in percentile points (61.8%, 50%, 38.2%, and 23.6%).

Here’s how to use Fib retracement for descending prices:

1. Pick the maximum and minimum price points on the chart.
2. Start drawing a Fib retracement frame from the maximum to the minimum.
3. Expand the length of the frame to the desired width.

Now, you will see potential support and resistance levels for an asset. Note that you will need to draw the frame in the opposite direction for ascending graphs.

How do you use a Tradeview strategy?

One of the reasons millions of retail traders flock to this service is the variety of specialized tools and user-created strategies that you can use whenever you want. Another big draw is the integration with a myriad of third-party services such as automation platforms like WunderTrading. However, we will talk about automation later.

Right now, we need to focus on using strategies. Without going into details about the minutia of every single strategy, we will explain how to use TradingView for crypto trading using a variety of preset strategies readily available on the website.

Here’s your simplified step-by-step guide:

1. Click “Indicators” in the top-most menu of the TradingView terminal.
2. Choose “Strategies” from the tabs above the list of indicators.
3. Pick what you need from the new list of strategies.
4. If you don’t see a desired strategy, try searching for it using the search bar.

It is that simple. Right after choosing any given strategy, you will see it deployed on the price chart. You should also know how to use multiple charts in TradingView. Some strategies require users to cross-compare it with price data on other assets.

Simply click the plus icon next to the name of the main viewed asset and choose the required asset from the list or use the search feature. It will quickly overlay one over another giving you a better view of price in the context of comparing it against other assets. It is a useful tool when dealing with futures and other derivatives.

How to use TradingView scripts

Experts and specialists are drawn to the platform thanks to its proprietary scripting language called Pine Code. This code is very easy to use and can be learned within a couple of days. However, mastering it is a different beast altogether. Again, it is not hard, but it requires a lot of trying before something good comes out of your coding efforts.

Scripts are excellent tools for people who understand technical analysis on a deep level and can easily identify components of a strategy that can be automated. In essence, a script is a code that generates alerts (signals) that can be used to either place orders manually or use automation tools to completely remove the human factor from the equation.

This approach demands a lot from retail traders, but it is also one of the most efficient ways to trade in the current environment. By combining your expertise in technical analysis with a little bit of coding on TradingView and bots from a reliable automation service, you can create a functional strategy that will generate money without heavy interventions on your part.

How to use scripts on TradingView?

In the bottom menu of the TradingView terminal look for “Pine Editor”. Click the button and a new window will open immediately. This window contains the code that will dictate when an alert will be triggered.

A very good video tutorial about using Pine Editor can be found on the official website of WunderTrading. This automation vendor specializes in using alerts generated by TradingView and translating them to actions on the crypto exchanges that you choose.

Any script can be directly connected to your bot on WunderTrading through a series of text strings inserted in the Pine Editor. It usually takes just a couple of minutes to set up everything and start trading using bots.

How does automation work?

TradingView is the premier platform for all automation vendors. The charting website has many ways to integrate with third-party services using API and the Pine Editor. Companies like WunderTrading leverage this technology and make sure that their clients can use the most popular charting tool in the world to its fullest potential.

Automation is a way for retail traders to make mundane tasks faster or more instant while completely removing any time wasted on idling or decision-making during the process of entering the market. Here’s how you will do it manually:

1. Choose a strategy on TradingView.
2. Create a script generating alerts.
3. Wait for an alert to pop up.
4. Go to your exchange and start placing an order.
5. Wait for order placement.

Note that between each step you will be wasting time on analyzing your next move, switching between browser tabs or devices, contemplating amounts, adjusting take-profit and stop-loss, and doing a variety of other tiny things that will collectively take so much time that a perfect moment for an entry would be missed.

This issue is particularly painful for day traders who often rely on their reflexes and quick reaction time to outperform the market. Bots can do it reliably while using your strategy. They will just execute it better. You will need to set up a bot once. After that, it will be fully autonomous.

Here’s how automation works:

1. A TradingView script generates an alert.
2. A bot picks it up and immediately sends commands to an exchange.
3. An exchange instantly executes orders as commanded.

The whole process takes seconds and even fractions of seconds depending on which exchange and automation vendor you use. We recommend choosing reliable CEX platforms that have massive trading volumes like Binance, KuCoin, OKX, and Kraken. On the automation front, choosing companies that can deliver consistent performance and good integration with TradingView and CEX platforms is great. WunderTrading and similar vendors are good examples.

Is TradingView good for day trading?

The answer is “it is!” This charting instrument is essential for a contemporary retail trader interested in cryptocurrencies. While Forex traders may be more inclined to using old-school platforms like MetaTrader, many experts believe that these instruments are outdated and cannot be compared to the massive arsenal of tools offered by TradingView.

Day traders rely on several things:

• Using a good technical analysis strategy. Years ago, many expert traders tried to come up with their methods and systems, but the vast majority utterly failed to generate something reliable. Consistent strategies are readily available in the TradingView catalog and you can choose what to use based on user feedback on forums.
• Receiving real-time market data. TradingView does not have any lags since it is directly connected to multiple servers and has top priority meaning that individual connections that some users may use when using desktop clients and terminals will lag.
• Receiving notifications and alerts. The alert system employed by TradingView is considered by many experts the best in the market. It is easy to use and can be adjusted to an impressive degree if you are willing to invest time and effort into learning Pine Code.

In conclusion

TradingView is a tool used by novices and experts alike. It is a powerful instrument for those who want to focus on using sophisticated technical analysis strategies and quickly deploy them on a price chart. Since the interface is polished and does not overwhelm users with unnecessary information, the learning curve is not steep. You also don’t need to install anything on your personal computer.

The integration with automation services makes TradingView a perfect source of market data for botting. Millions of people utilize automation technology and trade on par with institutionalized investors and fund managers. It is one of the most important advancements in the industry of retail trading in terms of leveling the playing field for all participants.

As you see from our tutorial, using tools offered by this charting platform is quite easy. You don’t need any technical expertise to deploy strategies and use a plethora of technical analysis tricks. However, if you dedicate time and effort to learning the Pine Code, you can create unique trading systems that will work wonderfully.

TradingView is an essential tool in an arsenal of a contemporary retail trader working with cryptocurrencies and other digital assets.