Chart Settings Deep Dive

The settings dialog is split into five logical tabs. Knowing what lives inside each one means you stop hunting through menus mid-session, which matters more than it sounds when a stock is moving and you want the log scale on right now.

The Symbol tab governs how market data itself is drawn: candle body, border and wick colours, whether extended-hours data is included, and which price lines are visible. It is the tab that changes what you are looking at rather than how it is decorated.

The Status Line tab controls the small block of text in the top-left corner of the chart — ticker, OHLC values (the Open, High, Low and Close prices of the candle your cursor is on), and live indicator readings. Beginners typically leave everything switched on and end up with text sitting on top of price action.

The Scales tab controls the mathematics of the vertical price axis and the behaviour of the horizontal time axis: linear versus logarithmic spacing, percentage mode, and the countdown timer showing how long the current candle has left before it closes.

The Canvas tab is genuinely cosmetic — background colour, gradients, grid-line opacity and the large faded ticker watermark. Its main practical use is reducing visual noise so that your drawn support and resistance zones are the strongest lines on the screen.

The Timezone/Sessions tab is the one Indian traders must not skip. It sets the clock the time axis is labelled with, draws the vertical breaks between one trading day and the next, and controls whether pre-open and post-close data is shaded onto the chart at all.

A useful habit: configure these once on a clean chart, then save that chart as a layout. Chart settings are stored per layout, so a workspace you saved with the wrong timezone will keep loading with the wrong timezone until you fix it and re-save.

The Symbol tab dictates how market data is rendered. Most users only ever change the candle colours — swapping the default red and green for a higher-contrast pair on a dark background — but several toggles on this tab change what information reaches your eye, not just how pretty it looks.

Candles are coloured in three separate parts: the body (the block between open and close), the border (its outline) and the wick (the thin line showing the extreme high and low). Colouring them independently is worth doing. Give wicks a brighter colour than bodies and rejection candles — long wick, small body — become visible at a glance while scrolling.

The Extended Hours toggle decides whether trading outside the main session is drawn. On NSE cash equities the main session runs 09:15 to 15:30 IST, with a pre-open call auction from 09:00 to 09:15. With Extended Hours off, a stock that opened well away from yesterday's close shows a clean overnight gap; with it on, some of that move is filled in with shaded early prints instead.

Neither view is wrong, but they answer different questions. The gap view tells you how far price moved while the market was shut. The extended view tells you where that repricing was first quoted. Traders who study opening ranges on NSE:RELIANCE or NSE:HDFCBANK usually keep it off, because a clean gap is easier to measure.

The price-line toggles are the underrated part of this tab. The Last Price Line draws a horizontal line at the current traded price. The Previous Day Close line marks where the last session finished, which is the reference every intraday percentage change on an Indian ticker is calculated from. Leaving that line on keeps you honest about whether a stock is genuinely up on the day.

Precision controls how many decimal places are shown. Most NSE equities are quoted to two decimals — ₹1,428.65 — and that is what you want. Currency pairs and crypto need more. Setting precision too high on a stock just fills the price scale with meaningless digits.

One further option worth knowing: you can hide candle bodies entirely and display only wicks. This strips the chart down to the highs and lows of each session and is occasionally useful when you are marking pure support and resistance levels and want the open/close relationship to stop distracting you.

The Status Line is the block of text in the top-left corner of the chart. It works like a heads-up display: it shows the active ticker and exchange, the OHLC values of whichever candle your cursor is hovering over, the change from the previous close, and a live reading for every indicator you have loaded.

OHLC is worth spelling out because everything on this line depends on it. Open is the first traded price of that candle's period, High the highest, Low the lowest and Close the last. On a 5-minute NSE:INFY candle those four numbers describe the whole five minutes; on a Daily candle they describe the whole 09:15–15:30 IST session.

The reason this matters is that the status line is how you read exact values without adding a single indicator. Hover over yesterday's Daily candle on NSE:HDFCBANK and you can read its precise high and low in rupees, rather than eyeballing where the wick sits against the price scale and being ₹3 out.

The common beginner mistake is leaving every toggle enabled. Load four indicators and the status line grows into a paragraph of text that physically covers the first fifty candles of the chart — precisely the region you scroll to when you want recent price action.

The fix is selective. Under the Indicators section, uncheck 'Arguments' and 'Values' but leave 'Titles' on. You still see which indicators are loaded, so you know what the lines on screen are, but you stop rendering their numeric inputs and live readings on top of price.

The Symbol section has its own toggles: ticker, chart type, OHLC values, bar change and volume. Turning off chart type and keeping OHLC is a reasonable compromise — you already know you are looking at candles, and the four prices are the part you actually read.

Finally, the background opacity slider gives the status line a semi-transparent panel behind it. On a dark theme with a busy chart, a light background at low opacity keeps the text legible without hiding candles completely, which is better than either extreme.

The Scales tab controls the mathematics of the vertical price axis. This is the single most misunderstood setting on the platform, because it is filed alongside colours and grid lines as though it were a display preference. It is not. It changes where your trendlines break.

A Linear scale gives equal vertical distance to equal rupee changes. A ₹10 move from ₹10 to ₹20 occupies exactly the same height on screen as a ₹10 move from ₹1,000 to ₹1,010 — even though the first doubled your money and the second moved it by one percent.

A Logarithmic scale gives equal vertical distance to equal percentage changes. A 100% move from ₹10 to ₹20 occupies the same height as a 100% move from ₹1,000 to ₹2,000. Because returns are what a trader actually experiences, log is the scale that matches how the money behaves.

Here is why this is an analysis decision and not a display preference. Take the arithmetic on its own: imagine an index that runs from 8,000 to 24,000 over several years. On a linear chart, the last 8,000 points of that run are drawn as tall as the first 8,000 points, so the later section looks vertical and unsustainable.

Now draw a rising support trendline under that whole run on the linear chart. Because the early moves are compressed into the bottom of the screen and the late moves are stretched, that line climbs far too steeply. Price only has to pause for the chart to print a break.

Draw the same support line on the log scale and it follows a constant percentage growth rate instead. It sits lower and flatter through the later years. The identical price series, the identical two anchor points, and two genuinely different break prices — that is the whole point.

So on a multi-year NIFTY 50 chart, 'has the long-term trendline broken?' has no answer until you say which scale you drew it on. Practitioners who work on monthly and weekly Indian index charts default to log for exactly this reason, and state the scale when they publish a level.

The practical rule is about span, not timeframe snobbery. If the highest price on your screen is less than roughly double the lowest, linear and log look almost identical and the choice does not matter. Once the range covers a multiple — a stock that has gone from ₹200 to ₹2,000, or a decade of index data — log is the honest view.

Toggle it with the small 'log' button in the bottom-right corner of the price scale, or through the Scales tab. 'Auto' is a separate, unrelated setting: it just refits whatever is on screen so candles do not run off the top or bottom. Auto and Log are usually both on for macro work.

Percentage mode is the third option and is built for comparison. It replots every series from a common zero at the left edge of the visible range, so NSE:TCS and NSE:INFY can be compared on relative performance rather than on the fact that one trades at a higher rupee price than the other.

The Canvas tab handles the chart's background. The single change worth making is dropping the opacity of the vertical and horizontal grid lines until they are barely visible. Default grids compete with your own drawn support and resistance zones, and on a busy chart the eye cannot tell which horizontal line was yours.

The same tab holds the watermark — the large faded ticker and description behind the candles. Turn it on before you screenshot a chart for a journal or a study group, because it labels the image permanently and stops an unlabelled screenshot circulating with no idea which instrument it shows.

The Timezone/Sessions tab is the one that changes analysis rather than appearance. Set the timezone to (UTC+5:30) Kolkata whenever you are looking at NSE or BSE instruments. There is no situation in Indian market analysis where a different clock is the right default.

The reason is that the timezone labels the horizontal axis. Leave a chart on New York time and the NSE open no longer sits at 09:15 on the axis — it is stamped with some other hour. Every note you write, every alert time you reference, and every 'the 11:30 candle rejected the level' becomes a different candle to anyone reading it.

Session settings are the other half. NSE cash equities trade 09:15 to 15:30 IST with a pre-open auction from 09:00 to 09:15. Whether those pre-open prints are drawn is a setting, and it decides how the day's first move appears on your chart.

This is where charts invent gaps that are not there — and hide ones that are. On a 5-minute chart with session breaks turned off, the last candle of one day sits immediately next to the first candle of the next. An overnight repricing then looks exactly like a violent intraday impulse, because nothing on screen marks the boundary between two sessions.

Turn Session Breaks on and TradingView draws a faint vertical line at each 09:15 IST open. The same jump is now instantly readable as an overnight gap, which is a completely different event from an intraday breakout and is measured, and invalidated, completely differently.

It cuts both ways. If extended-hours data is being drawn for an instrument that has it, a genuine overnight gap can be partially filled in by thin early prints, so the chart shows a run of small candles where a real gap exists. Knowing which setting is active is the only way to tell what you are looking at.

There is one more control on this tab worth setting: the countdown to bar close, which lives on the Scales tab but pairs with session work. It shows how many minutes and seconds remain in the current candle, which stops you reading an unfinished 15-minute candle as though it had already closed.