The Meteoric Rise of TradingView

In early March, eToro – the world’s largest social trading broker – announced that they were going to integrate TradingView – traditionally a sophisticated charting platform – directly into its own trading platform. Once the integration is complete, eToro clients will be able to trade directly from TradingView’s charts.

This integration with eToro, which is notoriously unenthusiastic about working with third parties, is the latest feather in TradingView’s cap as it continues a meteoric rise in popularity and publicity.

Traditionally, TradingView was a data-driven investor community, powering over 40,000 other websites and providing a social network for nearly 50 million traders. The company’s approach differs from other social trading networks because it is chart-based, with an incredibly powerful charting package featuring both pre-built and community-built indicators, custom time intervals, and a powerful back-testing function.

But since 2016, TradingView has started partnering with brokers, allowing traders to trade directly on their charts. Slowly at first, with just a few brokers signing up – but we’re beginning to see a real acceleration. No longer is TradingView just a (very sophisticated) charting tool, it is now a fully-fledged trading platform, and it’s probably the best trading platform in the world.

Since launching direct trading capabilities, TradingView has formed alliances with numerous well-known brokerage firms. In addition to partnering with eToro, the platform has completed eight other integrations since the start of 2022 alone. In November 2022, trading technology provider Tradesmarter incorporated TradingView’s charting tools into its white-label trading platform, Wow Trader. Before that, during the summer, BlackBull Markets and the cryptocurrency exchange, OKX revealed collaborations with TradingView, enabling users to carry out trades directly on the social network.

In May, Eightcap established a partnership, and in February, Australian-based broker Pepperstone joined the growing list of TradingView partners. Interestingly, unlike other third-party platforms like MT4, MT5, and cTrader, TradingView charges its users a subscription fee. There is a free version, of course, but it features advertising and is extremely limited in scope, only allowing three indicators per chart and a vastly reduced range of indicators. Serious traders will expect to pay at least $15 a month for the TradingView Pro subscription. But there are two more levels above the Pro tier, with Pro+ ($25 a month) and Premium ($50 a month), each offering more indicators per chart and
more alerts.

So, is it worth it? For traders who are already part of the TradingView network, it’s a no-brainer. TradingView is a one-stop-shop for technical analysis, fundamental analysis, community-driven trading ideas, and automated trading via its own simple coding language, Pine Script. All of this is backed up by TradingViews’s incredible charting package. So, if you were already paying for it, why wouldn’t you trade directly with it?

For those without a subscription already, it’s a more complicated question. MT4 and MT5 users are spoiled for choice when it comes to plugins and custom-built trading robots. MetaTrader’s signals allow a basic form of social trading, and if you want powerful backtesting, then MT5’s Strategy Tester is one of the best in the business. If you’re looking for a slick, modern interface with integrated news feeds, then cTrader does that too. All three trading platforms are free, so why would you switch?

But many brokers are betting that traders will make that switch. The whole debacle between Metatrader and the Apple store last year probably proved them partially right. While we don’t have any hard evidence, many of the brokers we work with report traders fleeing MT4 and MT5 in droves, many ending up at TradingView.

So, is this the end of free third-party trading platforms? Highly unlikely, people have predicted the death of MT4 more times than I can count, and plenty of people out there will baulk at the idea of paying for a trading platform on principle.

But it’s always good to have healthy competition, and TradingView is certainly shaking things up. There are more plans for broker integrations in the pipeline, and it’s obvious that we have another serious player in the trading platform space.