How to use TABLES in Pine Script V4 (+ Interview)

what's up traders welcome back to
another pantry lesson today's lesson is
going to be covering how to
create
visual tables
to draw onto your training view charts
but before we begin today's lesson i
just want to make you aware of a
interview i did recently with ivan the
head of market research over at global
prime this is global prime's youtube
channel right here global prime is an
australian based a book broker now don't
worry this isn't a paid promotion or
anything like that i'm just making you
aware of of what the deal is here
global prime
being an a book broker means that they
do not profit off your losing trades
most brokers in the retail trading
industry
operate what's called a b book and a b
book is where the majority of their
losing traders get placed and on this
bbook whenever you place a trade given
that the majority of your trades lose
in the case of a losing retail trader
you get placed on the b book and what
that means is the broker takes the other
side of your trade and profits off your
losses now we could go into a discussion
about the ethics of this and whether
it's moral or immoral or how it impacts
your trading as a profitable trader if
you're already unprofitable then it
really doesn't affect you that much to
be honest but if you're a profitable
trader or you're in the process of
becoming profitable it can be a huge
problem being switched from a b book to
an a book and even if there is no
problem with being on the b book
just the fact that the incentives are
misaligned between the broker and the
client is a big problem if your broker
makes money off you regardless of
whether you're successful then what
incentive do they have to help you
succeed a broker like global prime
depends on the longevity of their
clients the traders that trade with them
they make their money from commissions
spread markups and interest markups it's
a little bit complicated but it doesn't
really matter the core idea here is that
a broker like global prime prefers
profitable traders to be with them
because the more active you are the
larger you trade the more often you
trade the more money they make that's
also true of b-book brokers except that
in their case they don't care if you're
with them next week next month because
there'll be a new trader to fill your
spot so a b-book broker prefers quantity
over quality whereas an a book broker
prefers quality over quantity out of
their clients and so they are
incentivized and motivated to help their
clients become better traders which is
why they reached out to me to help
educate their clients about tradingview
and pinescript i'm a huge fan of global
prime and what they do their ethos their
their technique their way of doing
business so when ivan reached out to
interview me i didn't hesitate to say
yes and so the interview went up this
morning
and you can check it out here if you're
interested you can i'll leave a link in
the video description but the reason i
was interviewed by
global prime is because they recently
became fully integrated with the trading
view platform if you're a fan of my
channel then you know how much of a fan
i am of view and so it's great to see
a reputable low-cost broker come on to
trading view and allow traders to trade
through their platform directly on
trading view utilizing the power of pine
script and the power of the training
view platform now as i mentioned the a
book b book thing i'll go into all of
that in a future lesson i'm still
learning a lot of it myself to be honest
this is something that i haven't done
as much research as i should have done
being a trader i should know more about
this information than i do
but i'm in the process of educating
myself on the way brokers work how they
make money what their incentives are
when it comes to client relationships
and if you're interested in learning
more about that head over to their
youtube channel here and check out their
playlist
on how forex brokers make money this
playlist right here is phenomenal for
any traders who are curious
about how the retail trading industry
works behind the scenes anyway that's it
i don't want to hold you back any longer
let's get into today's lesson now this
is a feature or functionality that was
added to panscript relatively recently
and it's something i've been
implementing into my
the scripts that i use regularly
particularly scripts that i use to trade
such as the script you see here which is
my ultimate pullback indicator you can
see up here that i have a bunch of trade
statistics drawing i've got how many
trades the script has taken the average
risk reward
wins losses long wins short
win percentage
break even rate
break even quantity break even rate
percentage wise our max adverse
excursion and max favorable excursion
the average this is the how far price
goes on average towards our stop loss
before going on to hit our take profit
or how far it goes towards our take
profit before coming up and stopping us
out then we have a win rate and a danger
zone this danger zone is basically our
break-even zone for this script because
we're using a one-to-one risk reward at
the moment our danger zone is 50 so if
we win 50 or less of the time we're
going to be losing money and then down
here we have a bit of a
custom built back testing system that i
can put in my starting capital and it
will calculate my ending capital
my return
both in dollar amount and pips and in
percentage amount
and my max drawdown percentage
now in today's lesson i'm not going to
be covering how to build this out
because quite frankly it would take
uh it would take quite a while to build
something like this we're talking over
an hour
of coding potentially and i cover a lot
of this more advanced um
these more advanced concepts and
techniques in the indicators and
strategies course if you uh want to fast
track your learning of this stuff and
add this kind of functionality to your
own scripts
but in today's lesson i'm just going to
be showing you how to draw a table onto
your chart and then you can populate
that table or the the cells of that
table with whatever data you want so to
start with i'm going to hide the script
and create a new blank script all i've
done is set overlay to true
let's add this script to our chart and
get started so drawing tables onto your
chart is
it's not not too difficult but there is
there are a few things we need to do in
order to get it to work there's a few
steps involved and i'll walk you through
them now
uh below the video there'll be a link to
the trading view blog post that
announced the release of this feature
and in that post they include a number
of examples on how to use tables
i can't cover every
minor detail of tables because there is
quite a lot we can do with them
today i'm just showing you a practical
way to draw a basic table onto your
chart so that you can visually display
information
if you want to get really fancy with
your tables
that's something that you can learn to
do by checking out the examples over on
that blog post
or just reading through the
documentation on the trading view
reference manual
the pine script reference manual
so let's get started first thing we need
to do in order to display information to
a table is create our table so to do
that we use the var operator these are
persistent variables hopefully you've
learned about these by now if you're
watching this lesson
this just means that our table will not
be
recreated on every new bar we create the
table once and then we can update it
whenever we want to
so this is going to be a table variable
so var space table space and then this
is the name of the variable or the table
id so for this i'm just going to say
my
table and my table is going to be set to
table dot new
and then this inbuilt function will
create a new table for us it takes a
bunch of parameters
the first one is the position so you can
put your table in the i think the top
right bottom right
bottom left
maybe top left i'm not sure that's where
the indicators
tend to go so i'm not sure if you can
put in top left but you can put it in
the middle
top middle bottom middle and
sort of the center of your chart if you
type in here
position dot control space
here is a list of all the locations we
can place our table and we can place it
in the top left which is interesting
anyway
the probably the best place for it would
be the top right or bottom right
for the most part for most scripts so
for today's lesson we're going to stick
with top right
you could also
create this as a user setting and the
user could select where to place the
table but we'll keep it simple today and
we'll just hard code our table to be
placed in the top right of our screen
the next thing we need to specify is how
many columns and rows we want in our
table
so for today's lesson i'm going to go
with
let's go with
five columns and two rows so that'll
look something like this one two three
four five columns and then two rows so
our table will look something like this
kind of like what my ultimate pullback
indicator look like at the start and
then we can fill the cells with whatever
we want
we'll get to that in a moment
so we've got five columns five rows
there are a bunch of other parameters
here we could select
uh or work with i'm not going to touch
any of them because we don't need to
today all i'm going to do is set the
border width
border underscore width to
one pixel so in between our cells will
be a one pixel gap or one whatever this
is one unit gap so that's it if i save
the script that should compile fine
there we go
so the next thing we need to do is
update our table data
now the best practice for this is to do
this on the very last bar of your chart
so for this i check if bar state dot is
last so this is the very last bar on our
chart
then we update our
table
and to do that we use the
table dot cell function and this will
update the cell of the given table at
the given column and the given row so
for this we would pass my table
and for the very first
cell we want to pass in the zero column
and the zero row and then we need to
pass in some text
so i'm just going to create a new
variable here called text 1 and that's
just going to be set to some text
to begin with then we can specify the
width and height if we want to if you
don't specify the width and height and
that will be calculated automatically so
i recommend leaving them blank
for the most part unless you're doing
some advanced formatting of your table
and then next up we have our background
color
and our
text color
so you could set this to whatever you
want to i'm going to set mine to
color.black
and my text color to color.white
and then we need to
set our text
parameters so for this i'm going to set
text equals txt 1 comma and now this
should
if i save the script
create a table in the top right with
some text and this text could be
anything so we could say
closing price
backslash new line
and then we could add to string the
current bars close save the script and
there we go so this is a really handy
way to display information onto the
chart that you need either for your
trading or for debugging your scripts
can also be useful for that so let's
create a few more here let's
do text 2 equals and then we'll say
opening price
to string open
text three could be
uh pip gain
slash loss
backslash new line
uh two string and then we could say uh
open
minus or let's go close minus open
and then let's copy this table.cell
function a couple of times and now we
need to change our row and column
values in order to set which cell to
update so for our second
value here let's change all our text to
text to text three let's set the row to
one and then on the third one i will set
our column to one
and now if i save the script you can see
that we have some more information here
so notice that
we have a blank cell here the reason for
that is that this is our zero column so
as we add
columns to this table
they shift to the left so so if we've
got five columns here and we add in all
five text values to these cells
this column will be five cells to the
left
so that's important to note when
building out your tables
let's add a bunch of
other information here in text four
let's set to ema 50
ema
value
is plus two string we just say ema close
50
text five let's set that to
rsi value
backslash n to string rsi
uh clue
close 14
and let's copy this table.cell function
a couple more times
um and so we need to flip our row
numbers and column numbers um
increment them by one basically for each
cell so we've got zero zero zero one one
zero one one
two zero
two one
and let's change all of our text values
to
the appropriate one let's create a
text six let's create another text six
this can be
the percent
change uh plus two string
and then we can say here change
close
divided by
previous close
times 100 and then i need to
wrap that in parentheses
close that off
and that should work let's save the
script
and we get a few errors here uh because
we're using this under an if statement
if bar state dot is last
um these inbuilt functions are not
generating their value until the very
last bar we need to extract these from
the scope so let's
put these up here ema equals ema close
uh rsi
equals rsi close
and then change
we just say market change
market change
and paste all that in there now this
should compile without any warnings or
errors and we should be getting our
values up here perfect
now the decimal value is a bit long but
actually while we're here this isn't
really in the scope of the lesson but i
will show you how to truncate or or cut
the decimal values back to however many
decimal values you want as this is going
to be a common problem you run into
when displaying indicator values in text
the way we are here so i'm just going to
quickly add on a script that i was
working on recently that i know has this
inbuilt custom function that i wrote
if i scroll down here to this truncate
function
and copy that out
get rid of the script open up our table
script and i'll paste this at the very
top of our script
this is a custom function that truncates
or cuts the excess decimal places
of the number we pass it so we use this
function like this i would say
truncate
ema to two decimal places
and if i paste that in to all of these
now when i save the script all of these
numbers will be cut down to two
decimal places
there we go we don't want to cut our
price or our pip gain or loss down
uh just these indicator values and we
should probably add a
percentage sign on the end of this
percent change
and i think that'll do i mean you could
add we did create a table with five
columns so we could add two more
uh columns here if we wanted to but i'll
leave it there you get the idea i'm sure
just make sure that you have enough
columns in the table you created
if we were to set this down to 2 and
save the script we'll get an error
up here you can see that we have an
error because column two is out of the
table bounds
so
as far as i know there's nothing wrong
with having too many
columns in your table
but having too few is a problem so just
make sure that you have enough columns
and rows in your table
to be able to fill all the cells that
you do
in your script so let me save that
and we're pretty much done um just
really quickly
one last thing i'll show you to do just
because you might find it interesting
is how to change the background color
and text based on
for example let's change the percent
change background color to be green or
red based on whether this is a negative
value
so percent change is here uh market
change text six so down here we'll
change the background color to a
conditional statement we'll say
is market
change
greater than zero
if so set the background color to green
otherwise set it to red
and we can leave the text color as white
that should be fine let's save the
script
and there we go
now the value is red if we go to a
market that had a positive change
were there any on a friday
surely one market here we go
there we go green percent change so
that'll do obviously you can change the
location let's change it to top left
just to see what that looks like
it'll probably look pretty bad because
it'll be
covered by the ticker and everything i
don't think you'd ever want to set it
there but you could do
bottom right
or bottom left and for example if you
want to keep it out of the way of price
action maybe you want to set it to
bottom underscore left
save that
and now it's down here which is not a
bad spot for it
it keeps it out of the way of current
price action so that'll do it for today
obviously you can change the text color
as well if you want to and there are a
bunch of other parameters you can play
around with here if you want to
and as always just hold down control and
click on these if you want to read up
on uh what each parameter is capable of
doing anyway that'll do it for today
thank you for watching i hope you found
this lesson valuable and interesting in
your own coding take care best of luck
with your training and i will see you in
the next lesson
goodbye