Set up a clean chart, scan for stocks and let alerts do the watching, plus the sums on whether the free plan is enough

Published: 17 October 2026 · Last updated: 15 September 2026 · By Spencer Li, CFTe

Disclosure: one link in this post is our TradingView referral link, marked “(referral link)”. If you sign up for a paid plan through it, Synapse may earn a referral reward. TradingView did not pay for this post or review it.

TradingView is charting software that runs in your browser and on your phone. You use it to look at price charts, add indicators, scan for stocks and set alerts. You do not trade through it in this guide. You place the trade with your broker.

So how do you use it? Start with three jobs: chart, scan and alert. Set up one clean chart layout you can read in seconds. Use a screener or a watchlist to find the few stocks worth looking at today. Then set price alerts so the software watches the levels and you do not have to. The free Basic plan covers all three for a beginner. A paid plan starts to make sense when you hit its limits, and below are the sums that tell you when.

How do you set up your first TradingView chart?

Open the site, search for a ticker in the box at the top, and you have a chart. Now make it readable.

1. Pick daily candles. If you swing trade, the daily chart is the one that matters. Choose the daily interval in the timeframe menu above the chart.
2. Add a few indicators. Many swing traders use three moving averages, the 20, 50 and 200-day EMAs, to see the trend at a glance. Open the indicators menu on the top toolbar, search for “EMA”, and add each one with its length.
3. Save the layout. TradingView keeps saved layouts in your account, so every chart you open looks the same.

That last step matters more than it sounds, because when every chart you open has the same layout and the same lines in the same places, you stop re-learning the screen and start reading the price. If you want to know what each indicator is actually measuring, the technical indicators guide walks through the main ones. And if you prefer bare charts, the price action trading guide shows how to read them with almost nothing added.

How does TradingView fit a 15-minute routine?

Each of the three jobs has a place in TradingView.

The order matters. Scan first to find candidates, chart each one to check the setup, then set an alert on the level that would make you act. After that, close the laptop. The alert tells you when to come back.

How do you scan for stocks in TradingView?

TradingView has a built-in stock screener. You pick filters, such as price, volume and how far a stock sits from its moving averages, and it returns a list.

You can also write your own screener in TradingView’s Pine scripting language. You do not need code to start, though. The built-in screener’s filters do the first cut well enough. Our post on how to find stocks to swing trade gives the settings for that first cut, step by step.

Save the stocks that pass into a watchlist. That list is what you chart and alert on, and it should be short. If your list has 60 names, you will not look at any of them properly.

How do you set an alert?

Right-click on a price level on the chart and choose “Add alert”, or use the alert button on the top toolbar. The shortcut is Alt + A on Windows and Option + A on a Mac. Pick the condition, such as price crossing a level, and how you want to be told: a pop-up, an email or a notification in the phone app.

Now do the sum that decides your plan. Say your watchlist has 20 stocks and you want one alert on each. The free Basic plan gives you 3 price alerts. That covers 3 of your 20 stocks, so you would be checking the other 17 by hand. The Essential plan gives you 20 alerts, which covers the whole list.

So alerts, more than indicators, are usually the first limit a swing trader hits. They are also the feature that saves the most time, because an alert sitting on a level lets you get on with your day and come back only when the price has done the thing you were waiting for.

Is the free version of TradingView enough?

For a beginner, yes. Here are the plans as TradingView showed them to a Singapore visitor on 17 October 2026, per month when billed annually.

Read two columns first. Indicators per chart: Basic allows 2. Three moving averages are already one over that, so on the free plan you would drop one or combine them. Price alerts: as above, 3 alerts will not cover a real watchlist.

Then look at what a year costs. Essential is about S$200 a year. Plus is about S$390. Premium is about S$780. Most swing traders who need more alerts and a few more indicators will find Essential or Plus covers them. Premium and Ultimate are built for people running many charts and hundreds of alerts at once.

Prices change, so check the current numbers on TradingView’s pricing page before you decide. If you do upgrade, you can use our TradingView link (referral link). That is a referral link, so Synapse may earn a reward if you sign up for a paid plan through it. The free plan is still the right place to start.

If you want the daily routine that ties the chart, the scan and the alerts together, our free 15-Minute Swing Trader’s Checklist lays it out step by step. Get the free checklist →

Can you trust TradingView’s strategy tester?

A trader on Reddit asked exactly this in August 2026: “Is tradingview strategy tester reliable?”

The tester does what you tell it. It runs your rules over past bars and reports the result. The risk is in what you tell it. A strategy tuned until the curve looks perfect on past data usually performs worse on new data. And a test that rests on a handful of trades proves very little about what the same rules will do over the next hundred.

So treat the tester as a first filter, never as proof. Check how many trades the result rests on, include costs, and see if the rules still work on a different period. Our post on the law of large numbers in trading explains why the trade count matters more than the headline return.

So how should a beginner use TradingView?

Use it for three jobs, in order. Scan for a short list. Chart each name on one clean layout. Set alerts on the levels that matter, then step away.

Start on the free plan. When you find yourself checking stocks by hand because you ran out of alerts, that is the sign the paid plan would save you time. For the rest of the software and broker setup we use, see our trading tools and resources guide.

How many of the stocks on your watchlist could you stop staring at this week, if an alert were watching them for you?

FAQ

Is TradingView free?

Yes. The Basic plan costs nothing and gives you 1 chart per tab, 2 indicators per chart and 3 price alerts, as shown on TradingView’s pricing page on 17 October 2026.

Can you trade on TradingView?

TradingView is charting software. In this guide, you use it to analyse and set alerts, then place the trade through your broker.

Which TradingView plan is best for swing trading?

It depends on how many stocks you track. If you want an alert on each of about 20 stocks, the Essential plan’s 20 alerts fit. If you track more, or use more than 5 indicators, Plus is the next step.

How many alerts do you get on TradingView for free?

The Basic plan gives 3 price alerts, according to TradingView’s pricing page on 17 October 2026.

Is TradingView’s strategy tester accurate?

It runs your rules faithfully, but the result is only as good as the test. Check the number of trades, include costs, and test on a different period before you trust it.

Go deeper

TradingView is the tool. The routine is what makes it work. The free 15-Minute Swing Trader’s Checklist gives you the daily scan, the questions to ask before every trade, and the five rules that keep you in the game.

About the author. Spencer Li is The 15-Minute Trader and the founder of Synapse Trading. He is a Certified Financial Technician (CFTe) with 15+ years of trading, run from 70+ countries. He holds a B.Acc and B.BM from SMU. Every trade he takes is public, dated, losses left in. He teaches low-risk swing trading in 15 minutes a day, one system for any market.

Educational content only, not personalised financial advice. Trading carries risk, including loss of capital. Past performance is not indicative of future results. Synapse Trading is not licensed or regulated by MAS.

The Little Book of Common Sense Investing (Bogle): Summary and Key Ideas

Last updated: 23 August 2026 · By Spencer Li, CFTe

“The Little Book of Common Sense Investing” by John C. Bogle argues that the surest way for an ordinary investor to build wealth is to buy a low-cost index fund (a fund that simply tracks the whole market instead of trying to beat it), hold it for decades, and stop trying to be clever. Bogle, who founded Vanguard and created the first index fund for everyday investors, makes one core case across the whole book: most investors, professionals included, cannot beat the market consistently, and the fees they pay trying to do so quietly eat their returns. So the rational move is to own the market cheaply and let compounding do the work. The book is short, plain, and almost boring on purpose. That is the point. It is a manual for getting out of your own way.

I read this as a trader, not as a passive investor, and I still think it is one of the most important investing books ever written. Here is why, what is actually in it, and how a trader should read it.

Who is John Bogle, and why listen to him?

John C. Bogle (1929 to 2019) founded the Vanguard Group in 1975 and launched the first index mutual fund available to the public the following year. At the time, the idea of a fund that deliberately did not try to outperform was treated as a joke. Today index funds hold trillions of dollars, and Bogle is often called the “godfather of index funds.”

What makes him credible is that he spent a career arguing against his own industry’s profit centre. Fund companies make money from fees. Bogle’s whole message was that those fees are the enemy of the investor. He built Vanguard as a client-owned structure so it could keep costs low. Hence the no-nonsense tone of the book: he is not selling you a product. He is telling you to buy the cheapest, dullest thing on the shelf.

What is the book actually about?

The book makes one argument and defends it from several angles: own the entire market through a low-cost index fund, hold for the long term, and refuse to be talked out of it.

Bogle’s reasoning runs like this. The stock market, over a long enough horizon, delivers a return that reflects the real growth of the businesses inside it. That return is there for the taking. The problem is that investors keep subtracting from it: trading costs, management fees, taxes from churn, and bad timing decisions driven by fear and greed. An index fund minimises every one of those leaks. You capture close to the full market return because you are not paying anyone to try (and usually fail) to beat it.

The villain of the book is cost. Bogle’s most quotable idea is simple: in investing, you get what you don’t pay for. A 2% annual fee sounds small. Over 30 years of compounding, it can quietly consume a large slice of your final wealth. That is the engine behind everything else he says.

The core ideas, without the repetition

The source material for this book lists the same handful of points many times over. Stripped down, Bogle is really making six arguments:

1. Own the whole market. A broad index fund gives you instant diversification (spreading money across many holdings so no single one can sink you) at almost no cost.
2. You probably can’t beat the market, and neither can the pros. The majority of actively managed funds underperform their index over the long run, especially after fees.
3. Cost is the thing you can actually control. You cannot control returns. You can control how much you pay, so drive it to the floor.
4. Compounding rewards time more than cleverness. Start early, stay invested, and let the math run. Trying to get rich quickly usually does the opposite.
5. Your emotions are the other enemy. Fear and greed make people sell at bottoms and buy at tops. A simple plan you can hold through a crash beats a brilliant plan you abandon in a panic.
6. Simplicity wins. The more moving parts, the more places to leak money and nerve. Boring is a feature.

Active funds vs index funds, over time

Here is the comparison at the heart of Bogle’s case, laid out plainly:

Do note that this is the long-horizon picture. Over a single year, plenty of active funds beat the index. The trouble is that the winners rarely repeat, and you cannot know in advance which ones they will be. Across decades, the cost drag compounds and the odds tilt hard toward the cheap, simple option.

How should a trader read this book?

This is the part people get wrong. They see “index funds win” and assume Bogle is telling everyone to never trade. That is not the lesson I take.

The mistake is mixing the two, treating your serious savings like a casino, or treating your trading capital like it should be left alone for 30 years.

So read Bogle as the floor. He is right that most people who try to beat the market lose to it. He is also describing exactly why a disciplined, low-cost, rules-based approach matters whether you are indexing or trading. The discipline is the same. Cut costs, control emotions, think in decades, and do not confuse activity with progress.

Here is the one honest caveat. If you are going to trade actively, Bogle’s data is a warning shot worth taking seriously. It tells you the bar is high and the average participant is below it. That should make you more rigorous about edge, sizing, and process. A fund manager with a research team usually fails to beat a dumb index. That is the company you are choosing to keep when you decide to trade, so bring a real system or don’t bother.

Where the human edge comes in

An index fund is the ultimate “let the machine do it” investment. You hand the whole job to a rules-based vehicle and walk away, and for most people that is the right call. The judgment is not in running it. It is in deciding which money belongs there and which money you are willing to actively manage, sizing each bucket to your real life, and then having the discipline to leave the long-term bucket alone through a 30% drawdown. The fund captures the market return. Whether you actually keep it is down to your behaviour, and that is the first of the Five Edges no fund can supply for you.

FAQ

What is the main message of The Little Book of Common Sense Investing?
Buy a low-cost index fund that owns the whole market, hold it for the long term, and stop trying to beat the market. Bogle argues that low cost and simplicity, not stock-picking skill, are what actually drive long-term investing success.

Is The Little Book of Common Sense Investing worth reading?
Yes, especially if you are new to investing or want to simplify a portfolio that has drifted into too many funds and fees. It is short, plain, and built around one durable idea. Experienced traders also benefit from it as a reminder of how much cost and emotion quietly cost you.

What does Bogle mean by “you get what you don’t pay for”?
He means that in investing, lower cost directly raises your net return. Because you cannot control the market’s return, the fees you avoid are the most reliable way to keep more of what the market gives. Over decades of compounding, even a small annual fee can consume a large share of your final wealth.

Does Bogle say you should never trade or pick stocks?
He argues that most investors, including professionals, fail to beat the market consistently, so for the bulk of your money, indexing is the rational default. He does not claim it is impossible to trade well, only that the odds are against the average participant, which is a reason to be disciplined rather than reckless.

Are index funds really safer than active funds?
Index funds are not immune to market crashes, since they fall with the market they track. What they remove is the extra risk of a single manager underperforming and the steady drag of high fees. Bogle’s point is about reliability and cost; you still carry market risk.

Now that you have Bogle’s case for the boring, low-cost, long-term approach, the real question is which of your money it should govern, and which money you are willing to actively trade with a real system. Have you read this one? Let me know your key takeaway in the comments.

For more, browse the full shelf: Best Investing and Trading Books of All Time.

Want a system for the active side of the ledger? Grab the free 15-Minute Swing Trading Starter Kit, the exact routine I use to scan once a day and trade any market in 15 minutes.

About the author. Spencer Li is The 15-Minute Trader and the founder of Synapse Trading. He is a Certified Financial Technician (CFTe) with 15+ years of trading, run from 70+ countries. He holds a B.Acc and B.BM from SMU. Every trade he takes is public, dated, losses left in. He teaches rules-based swing trading in 15 minutes a day, one system for any market.

Education, not financial advice. Synapse Trading is not licensed by MAS to advise on investment products. Trading carries risk of loss; past performance is not indicative of future results.

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Best Investing and Trading Books of All Time (pillar) · The Intelligent Investor summary