How to use Trading Charts on TradingView
TradingView is an extremely useful trading environment, with a robust list of tools for both fundamental and technical analysis. A great feature that can help traders react quickly when markets are moving are TradingView’s trading charts. Not only do these charts help you gain deep market insight, but you can also use them to trade, here’s how.
Loading Instruments on TradingView Trading Charts
First, you’ll need to load the instrument you are interested in looking at. To do this, navigate to the upper right corner next to the ‘hamburger menu’. Click on the instrument currently loaded and you will receive a pop-up with all the instruments easyMarkets offers on TradingView. Click on your preferred instrument or search for it. If you have open trades, you can load their chart just by clicking on it.
Add a Comparison
Clicking on the plus symbol next to the instrument pair you currently have loaded allows you to add an index such as the S&P500 to compare your instrument against.
Choosing Timeframe
Depending on your trading strategy you may need to see your chart in different reference timeframes. Next to the instrument pair and plus symbol you will see letter or a letter and a number – each symbolizes a different span of time – i.e. 1 hour, 1 day, 1 month etc.
Type of Chart – to Candlestick or not to Candlestick
An ongoing and controversial topic amongst traders – is what type of chart should you choose. And the answer is the one you prefer. TradingView offers multiple types of chart symbols including bars, candles, hollow candles, line, area, baseline, Heikin Ashi, Renko, Line Break, Kagi, Point & figure and range.
Use Your Indicators
Next to the chart symbol customization you can add indicators to your charts, including the most widely used ones such as Fib levels, Bollinger Bands, RSI and SMA.
Save Indicator Template or Use Community Created Templates
If you use a unique set of indicators then you can save this as a template, share it with the community or even use other traders’ templates!
Chart customization
You can completely customize the appearance of your chart as well. In the upper right corner click on the gear symbol and you will be presented with a pop-up. In this window you have an extensive choice of options to create your own chart layout. You can change and adapt the symbol (candlestick), status line, scales, appearance, trading and events. This can help you better analyze the chart you are looking at or better label a trade idea when sharing. You can also access chart customization by double clicking on a candlestick.
On Chart Trading Functions
Right on the chart you can quickly adjust stop loss, add take profit and close your trade. If you have an open position hover over your position click and drag your take profit (displayed as TP) to the level you’d like it to execute at. To adjust stop loss, click and drag it to level you’d like. You can also adjust all of these levels, by double clicking on your position (which shows the size and Profit) to open a side menu to the right. To open a trade you can click on the blue ‘buy’ or red ‘sell’ rate in the upper left corner of the chart.
Finally if you hover towards the ‘rate’ (Y axis) scale, you will see a black box with the rate your cursor is close to. If you click on the ‘+’ symbol next to this box you have the option to add an alert at that rate, set a limit order – which will automatically be a sell order if it is below the current rate or a buy order if the limit order is higher than the current rate. You can also create an order from the pull out menu on the right by clicking the ‘create new order…’ option. Finally you can also draw a horizontal line at the specific rate.