TradingView Indicators FAQ

Repainting means a script behaves differently on historical bars than it did in real time, so signals you saw live can move, change or vanish after the chart reloads. TradingView's Pine Script docs define it as "script behavior causing historical vs realtime calculations or plots to behave differently" and estimate that more than 95% of indicators repaint in some form. Not all of it is harmful: RSI and MACD values move until the bar closes, which is normal. The misleading kinds plot values into the past, leak future data, or fire alerts on unconfirmed intrabar values.

Watch it live, then reload. Add the indicator during market hours, screenshot signals as they print on the open candle, then refresh the chart and compare. If arrows moved, vanished or appeared on earlier candles, it repaints. TradingView's Pine Script docs suggest asking the author specific questions instead of "does it repaint?": do alerts and signal markers wait for the realtime bar to close, does the script plot values into the past, and does a strategy use calc_on_every_tick? A signal that flickers on and off before the candle closes is the most common visible symptom.

A fair value gap is a three-candle pattern where the middle candle moves so fast that the wicks of candle 1 and candle 3 do not overlap. In a bullish FVG, candle 3's low is above candle 1's high; a bearish FVG is the mirror image. The term comes from ICT (Inner Circle Trader) community teaching, not from an exchange or a TradingView standard, so indicators define and filter FVGs differently. Many traders expect price to return and "fill" the gap, but that is a belief to test on your own market, not a rule.

In ICT and "smart money concepts" vocabulary, an order block is usually the last opposite-colored candle before a strong move: the last down candle before a sharp rally (bullish) or the last up candle before a sharp drop (bearish). Traders mark that candle's range as a zone where they expect price to react if it returns. It is community terminology, not an exchange or TradingView standard, and definitions vary by teacher and indicator. One TradingView script author notes that the common definition fits almost any pullback, which is why order block tools can cover a chart in boxes.

In exchange terms, liquidity is how easily you can trade at a fair price; CME Group's education ties it to plenty of volume coming into the market. ICT traders use the word differently: "liquidity" means clusters of resting orders, mostly stop losses, sitting above obvious highs and below obvious lows. A "liquidity sweep" is price briefly running past one of those levels, triggering the stops, then reversing. This is community terminology, not an exchange definition. Price can also take out a high and keep going, so a sweep is not a reversal signal on its own.

VWAP, the volume weighted average price, is the average price over a period weighted by how much volume traded at each price. TradingView's Help Center calculates it as typical price (high plus low plus close, divided by 3) times volume, summed, then divided by summed volume, and it resets each anchor period, such as every session or week. Traders read price above VWAP as an intraday uptrend, below as a downtrend, and repeated crossing as a sideways market. TradingView warns VWAP lags, more so later in the day, because it averages past data.

The micros are one-tenth the size of the E-minis, with the same 0.25-point tick. Per CME Group contract specs checked 5 Oct 2026: E-mini Nasdaq-100 (NQ) is $20 x the index, so one tick is $5.00; Micro E-mini Nasdaq-100 (MNQ) is $2 x the index, one tick $0.50. E-mini S&P 500 (ES) is $50 x the index, one tick $12.50; Micro E-mini S&P 500 (MES) is $5 x the index, one tick $1.25. So a 10-point move is $200 on NQ, $20 on MNQ, $500 on ES and $50 on MES, per contract. One point equals four ticks.

Micro Gold (MGC) is one-tenth of the standard Gold futures contract (GC). CME Group's specs, checked 5 Oct 2026, list GC at 100 troy ounces with a minimum move of $0.10 per ounce worth $10.00, and MGC at 10 troy ounces with the same $0.10 tick worth $1.00. A $10 move in gold is therefore $1,000 per GC contract and $100 per MGC contract. Both trade Sunday to Friday, nearly around the clock, with a 60-minute break each day starting at 4:00 p.m. CT.

CME Group's equity index futures (ES, MES, NQ, MNQ) trade on CME Globex from Sunday 6:00 p.m. to Friday 5:00 p.m. ET, with a daily maintenance period from 5:00 p.m. to 6:00 p.m. ET (4:00 p.m. to 5:00 p.m. CT). Nothing trades on Globex during that hour, so plan exits and open orders around it. Gold futures (GC, MGC) follow a similar schedule with a 60-minute daily break starting at 4:00 p.m. CT. Holiday sessions can differ, so check CME Group's holiday calendar before trading around a holiday.

TradingView's Strategy Tester fills trades with a broker emulator that, by default, sees only each bar's open, high, low and close and assumes the path price took inside the bar. Live markets fill tick by tick, with slippage. The Pine Script docs say slippage is dynamic and unpredictable, so it cannot be simulated precisely, but adding fixed slippage in ticks plus commission makes results more realistic. Premium and Ultimate users can set Bar detalization to "High" for intrabar fills. Lookahead bias and tick-by-tick settings can also inflate backtests, so forward test on live data first.