How To Add Indicators On Tradingview – Complete Guide

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TradingView is a powerful charting and analysis platform used by millions of traders and investors around the world. One of the key features of TradingView is the ability to add various technical indicators to charts to help analyze price movements and identify potential trading opportunities. In this guide, I’ll walk through the steps to add some of the most common indicators on TradingView.

Getting Started

First, you’ll need to open a chart for the asset you want to analyze. This can be a stock, currency pair, commodity, cryptocurrency, etc. At the top left of the chart, click on the “Indicators” button. This will open up the Indicator panel on the left side of the screen.

The Indicator panel has a search bar at the top where you can look up indicators by name. Below that, indicators are grouped into categories like “Trend”, “Momentum”, “Volume”, and more.

Adding an Indicator

Let’s add a simple moving average (SMA) to our chart. The SMA is under the “Trend” category. Click on “Simple Moving Average” and you’ll see a box pop up with the indicator settings.

For the SMA, you’ll want to adjust the “Length” parameter. This sets the lookback period for calculating the average. For example, a 20 SMA calculates the average price over the last 20 periods. Let’s set the length to 50 to add a 50-period SMA to the chart.

Click the “Add” button and you’ll now see the SMA plotted on the price chart. It will be labeled “SMA(50)” by default. You can edit the label by clicking on the indicator in the chart and changing the name.

You can add multiple instances of the same indicator. For example, add a 20 SMA, 50 SMA, and 200 SMA to see moving averages for different trends. Just repeat the same process above and change the length parameter each time.

Editing Indicator Settings

To edit an indicator’s settings after you’ve added it, click on the indicator label at the bottom of the chart. This will reopen the settings pop-up. Here you can change parameters like the SMA length, line color, style, etc.

When you’re done editing, click the “Apply” button to save the changes. The chart will update with the new settings.

Deleting Indicators

To remove an indicator from the chart, hover over the indicator label at the bottom of the chart and click the “x” that appears. This will permanently delete that indicator.

If you just want to temporarily hide an indicator, uncheck the box next to the indicator name in the Indicator panel on the left. This will hide it from view but keep the settings there so you can re-enable it later.

Saving Indicator Templates

Once you have a collection of indicators set up the way you want, you can save them as a template to easily apply to other charts.

To do this, click on the “Template” icon in the Indicator panel (it looks like a page with a star). Choose “Save template” from the menu and give your template a name.

Now when you want to load that combination of indicators onto another chart, select the “Template” icon again, choose your saved template, and click “Apply”. All the associated indicators will be added to the new chart.

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Some Common Trading Indicators

Here are some of the most popular indicators traders use on TradingView and how they can be applied:

Moving averages – As described above, these show the average price over a set period. Use to identify trading ranges and potential support/resistance levels.
Bollinger Bands – A volatility band that plots standard deviations above and below a moving average. Can identify overbought/oversold levels.
MACD (Moving Average Convergence Divergence) – Shows momentum by comparing a short and long moving average. Trading signals when the MACD line crosses the signal line.
RSI (Relative Strength Index) – Indicates overbought (>70) and oversold (<30) conditions in a security. Can spot divergences with price.
On Balance Volume – Tracks buying and selling pressure as a cumulative total. Higher OBV can confirm an uptrend.

There are hundreds of indicators available on TradingView. Experiment with adding different combinations to develop a chart setup that fits your trading style and helps give you an edge in the markets.