What is TradingView?

TradingView is a cloud-based charting and market-analysis platform used by traders and investors in more than 180 countries. "Cloud-based" simply means the software runs on TradingView's servers and is delivered to you through a browser tab — the way Gmail works — rather than being installed on your machine the way an older desktop terminal is. Nothing is downloaded, nothing needs a licence key, and there is no separate machine you have to sit at to see your own charts.

The platform is built from three layers that most traders end up using together. The first is the charting engine, which TradingView calls Supercharts: the canvas where price is drawn, where you mark support and resistance, and where you apply studies. The second is the data layer, which supplies quotes, historical candles, corporate financials and economic releases. The third is the community layer, where users publish annotated charts and share the small programs they have written to run on their own charts.

For an Indian trader the practical picture is this. You can chart NIFTY 50 and BANKNIFTY, cash-market names such as NSE:TCS, NSE:HDFCBANK and NSE:INFY, MCX commodities such as gold and crude oil, and offshore markets such as the S&P 500 — from the same screen and with the same set of tools. Prices are shown in rupees for Indian instruments, so a level marked at ₹1,420 on NSE:INFY reads exactly as it does on your broker's order window.

One thing TradingView is not is a broker. You cannot deposit money into it and it does not hold your shares. It is an analysis surface. Order placement happens either at your broker, or through a broker account you have separately connected to the chart. Keeping that distinction clear from day one saves a lot of confusion later.

TradingView was founded in September 2011 by Stan Bokov and Denis Globa in Westerville, Ohio. Bokov was a software engineer who also traded, and the charting software available to him at the time was a poor experience: heavyweight desktop installations, licences tied to a single machine, interfaces that had barely changed in a decade, and data feeds sold separately at prices that only an institution could justify. If your machine died, your years of saved chart work went with it.

The founding idea was unusual for 2011. Build the entire charting engine in HTML5 — the standard web technology browsers already understood — so that it needed no plug-ins such as Flash or Java. Keep a usable version permanently free so that a beginner could open a chart without a payment decision. And make published analysis a first-class feature, so a chart could be shared as a link rather than as a screenshot pasted into a forum.

That combination is what compounded. Because charts lived on the server, they could be shared; because they could be shared, traders arrived through each other rather than through advertising; and because so many traders arrived, developers had a reason to publish tools on the platform. By 2021 the company had raised roughly $298 million at a $3 billion valuation. Today it reports over 100 million registered users and integrations with more than 100 brokers worldwide, including several that serve the Indian market.

Supercharts is the name TradingView gives its charting engine. Underneath the branding it does three jobs: it renders price, it lets you draw on price, and it lets you run calculations on top of price. Rendering sounds trivial until you scroll a five-year daily chart of NSE:HDFCBANK back to its 2020 lows and the candles keep pace with the mouse — the engine keeps a large history in memory and redraws it as you pan, which is the difference between studying a chart and waiting for one.

Drawing is where most price-action work happens. The left toolbar holds trendlines, horizontal levels, rectangles for marking consolidation zones, and measurement tools that report how far price travelled and over how many candles. It also carries specialist families: Fibonacci tools, which divide a completed price swing by fixed ratios such as 38.2% and 61.8% to mark where a pullback may stall; Gann tools, named after the 1930s trader W.D. Gann, which project angled lines to relate price movement to elapsed time; and Elliott Wave tools, which label a trend as a repeating five-leg advance followed by a three-leg correction. Magnet mode snaps every anchor to the exact high or low of a candle, so a level marked at ₹1,632.40 is genuinely at that price rather than near it.

Calculations are the third job. The platform ships with roughly 400 built-in studies and hosts about 100,000 more published by users. A study is just a formula drawn on the chart. Some are as simple as an average of the last fifty closes; others summarise volume by price level. The vocabulary you will meet most often includes RSI — the Relative Strength Index, a 0-to-100 line measuring how one-sided recent closes have been; MACD — Moving Average Convergence Divergence, which plots the gap between a fast and a slow moving average; and Bollinger Bands, an average with two bands set a fixed distance above and below it so you can see when a range has become unusually tight or unusually wide. None of these is required to read a chart. Price, volume and candle behaviour on their own are a complete method.

TradingView also treats the chart type itself as a variable. Beyond candles and bars there are seventeen to twenty-one types depending on plan, including Heikin Ashi — candles built from averaged prices, which smooths a trend and hides small reversals; Renko — a chart of fixed-size bricks that only prints a new brick when price moves a set amount, ignoring time entirely; and Kagi — a line that changes thickness when price reverses past a threshold. Timeframes are equally flexible, from one-second charts through custom intervals such as seven minutes up to monthly candles for multi-year base-building.

The chart is the front door, but a working analysis routine touches three other areas. The first is the screener — a filter that runs across an entire exchange at once. There are roughly 5,000 listed securities across NSE and BSE, and no one reads 5,000 charts. A screener lets you state conditions in plain terms — traded on NSE, average daily volume above a threshold, price above its 200-day average, closing within a few percent of its 52-week high — and returns the handful of names that satisfy all of them. That list, not the whole exchange, is what you actually chart.

The second is alerts, and the mechanism matters more than the feature name. TradingView alerts are evaluated on TradingView's servers, not in your browser. When you mark resistance on NSE:INFY at ₹1,680 and set an alert there, the condition keeps being checked whether or not your laptop is open. The notification reaches you by push message on the phone app, by email, or by a webhook — a message posted automatically to another web address, which is how traders wire alerts into their own scripts. For anyone who cannot watch a screen between 09:15 and 15:30 IST because of a day job, this is the single most useful thing on the platform.

The third is fundamental data. Income statement, balance sheet and cash-flow figures for listed companies can be plotted directly beneath the price chart, so quarterly revenue or debt sits on the same time axis as the candles. Alongside it, an economic calendar tracks scheduled releases — RBI policy dates, inflation prints, GDP releases — which is how you avoid being surprised by a calendar event you could have known about.

Underneath all of it sits Pine Script, TradingView's own small programming language. It exists so that a trader who cannot write software in general can still express one specific idea — highlight every candle that closes above the previous twenty candles' high, say — and have the platform draw it. Roughly 100,000 published scripts already exist, most with their source code visible, so reading other people's is the usual way in.

The honest answer is that the platform scales, and the reason is cloud sync. Everything you do is saved against your account rather than against a device. Mark a base on the NSE:HDFCBANK weekly chart on a desktop in the evening, and the same line is on the phone chart the next morning. Set an alert from the phone during the day, and it fires to whichever device you are logged into. There is no export step, no backup file, and nothing to lose when a machine is replaced — which is what makes the platform usable for someone whose analysis happens at home and whose market hours happen elsewhere.

For a beginner the sensible starting point is deliberately small: one instrument, one timeframe, no studies at all. Load a daily chart of NIFTY 50, mark the highs and lows that price has clearly reacted to more than once, and watch what happens when those levels are tested again. Support and resistance, volume behaviour at those levels, and how a candle closes relative to its own range will carry you a long way before any calculation is needed. Adding six studies to a chart in week one is the most common way beginners make a chart harder to read, not easier.

As holding periods shorten, the tooling used tends to change. A swing trader holding for several candles on the daily chart is mostly working with levels and alerts, and cares about being told when a level is reached rather than about watching it happen. An intraday trader working on five-minute NIFTY or BANKNIFTY charts between 09:15 and 15:30 IST cares about screen space and speed, and often about VWAP — the Volume Weighted Average Price, a running average of the day's trades weighted by how much volume traded at each price, which many intraday traders use as a reference for whether the session is trading rich or cheap relative to itself. A trader building tools cares about the Pine editor and the strategy tester. Same platform, three different halves of it.

None of these are recommendations about how you should trade. They are descriptions of what different users touch, offered so that you can recognise which parts of a very large platform are relevant to you now and which can safely be ignored for another year.

Most Indian retail traders already have charts, because every broker platform ships with some. The difference is not that one draws candles and the other does not — it is depth and portability. Broker-bundled charting usually offers a smaller set of studies, a shorter drawing toolbar, and no way to run a saved layout on a different device without rebuilding it. Its real advantage is that the order window is right there. That is why a very common arrangement is analysis in one place and execution in another, and it is worth understanding as a workflow rather than as a contest between products.

The second category is legacy desktop terminals — installed software with a per-seat licence and a separately billed data feed. These remain powerful and are still standard in some institutional settings, but they are tied to a machine, they need IT support to move, and their pricing is built for a firm rather than an individual. The browser-based model removes the install, removes the machine dependency, and replaces the licence with a subscription that has a genuinely usable free tier at the bottom.

The third category is screener and data websites, which are strong on fundamentals and ratios but usually thin on charting: you get a serviceable price chart, not a canvas you can draw on precisely. Traders often run these alongside TradingView rather than instead of it. The practical takeaway is that TradingView's distinguishing features are the ones no single-purpose tool combines — a deep drawing surface, server-side alerts, a scripting language, and a workspace that follows you across devices.

This section deliberately does not tell you which broker to use or rank one against another. That is outside what an educational page should be doing, and the comparison that actually matters is between the tool you have now and the specific job you are unable to do with it.