TradingView indicators: simple steps to get started
An indicator is a visual representation of trading and financial statistics — price levels, trading volume, financial ratios, and others. Analyzing changes in such values, their relations, and changes allows you to assess the probability of future price movements and build your trading strategy based on historical data. Trend direction, its strength, continuation, and potential reversal — all can be predicted to some extent with a solid and tested setup of different indicators.
CONTENTS:
Types of indicators
Different indicators aim for different goals. Based on the analytical approach, they can be technical or fundamental.
Technical indicators
Technical analysis is based on purely trading data that comes from exchanges — trading prices and volume. Technical indicators take this data and calculate it using various ratios, which are then plotted on the chart as lines, columns, points, geometric figures, and other visual elements. In addition, there are indicators based on other indicators, allowing you to see the relationships between indicators.
There's no universal indicators that work for all cases and all traders. And finding the right ones for you can take some time. Explore several, configure them, and find those that match your trading style.
Trading cautiously and being ready to reconfigure your setup is crucial. So we recommend exploring paper trading to find the best setup for you in a risk-free environment.
Fundamental indicators
Fundamental analysis looks at the real financial health of the company. Instead of focusing on charts or price moves, it uses balance sheets, income statements, cash flow data, economic reports, and overall market conditions. This information turns raw data into useful metrics — like profitability ratios, valuation measures, and growth indicators.
Its strength comes from focusing on actual business performance, helping to assess whether a company is profitable, handles debt well, or operates in a growing industry. Some metrics make more sense when viewed together. For example, revenue growth is more meaningful when combined with profit margins.
Different investors focus on different indicators based on their goals. For valuation analysis, you may want to look at price-to-book ratios, while when focusing on growth, you may prioritize earnings momentum.
Learning takes time, but understanding what drives each metric builds an approach that works in any market. Start with a few key indicators instead of trying to learn everything at once. Understand what they do well, where they fall short, and when they are most useful.
Important: Use indicators you are most familiar with. Before using an indicator, study it thoroughly first. Understanding the calculation principles may take time, but it strengthens your confidence and accelerates your learning in the future. To start your learning path, navigate to the built-in indicators section in the knowledge base. Or click on the "?" icon on the right-hand side of the indicator.
Pine Script indicators
The TradingView community has created 100,000+ custom indicators, with the power of our Pine Script®, which allows using both technical and fundamental data.
We have two types of documentation that can help you start exploring and integrating Pine into your trading:
- User manual: Detailed documentation describing the language's main features, syntax, and structure, and how it works with community scripts
- Pine Script reference: Quick reference material for all functions, variables, and keywords available in Pine, with examples of how to use each
You can also access indicators written by other TradingViewers and incorporate them into your strategy. They usually come with detailed explanations of calculation mechanics, syntax, and use cases.
How to access indicators
On TradingView, you can access indicators from different products.
On Supercharts, find the indicators dialog at the upper toolbar.
Then click "Technicals," "Fundamentals," or choose community indicators.
In screeners, click the "+" icon in the header and select indicators and metrics based on their category.
For conducting fundamental analysis, you can navigate to the Fundamental Graphs and add metrics for companies you want to examine.
Indicators in a nutshell
On TradingView, you can find various indicators for any goal you're set to achieve, whether you want to analyze a company's performance for a long-term investment or you're an active trader looking for sophisticated instruments. Using the Pine Script language, you can create custom indicators, which can be based on both technical and fundamental data.
Each indicator can be configured to align with your trading style and visually customized so you can more easily track important data. After you study them one by one, you can then combine them with other tools to achieve your goals.
Also read: