Reading the indicator.

Installing the indicator

Once you've subscribed, the indicator is granted to your TradingView account by username. To add it to a chart:

1. Open any chart on TradingView.
2. Click the Indicators button in the top toolbar.
3. Open the Invite-only scripts tab.
4. Click TradeSymbiotic.com - Premium. It loads on your chart immediately.

Anatomy of the chart

Trade Symbiotic draws onto two places: the price panel (over your candles) and an oscillator panel below it. Both are organised into the same three timeframe tiers: Ripple, Wave and Tide.

• On price: three bands (one per tier), a smoothed envelope around price. The slow Tide band is drawn thickest, the fast Ripple hugs price most tightly.
• In the oscillator panel: each tier shows its Ebb/Flow line, its Fathom area, and overbought / oversold rails coloured by the Breaker.

You can show or hide each tier independently, both its bands and its oscillator, so you can declutter to just the timeframes you trade.

Colour & conviction

Almost everything on the chart is encoded with two colours (teal up, coral down) plus a brightness cue on the Breaker. Learn these and you can read the whole indicator at a glance.

• Teal = bullish / rising. Coral = bearish / falling. This applies to every band, every line, every fill. (Both colours are yours: two pickers at the top of the settings recolour the entire indicator.)
• Brightness = conviction (on the Breaker). A full, saturated Breaker colour is a strong, established state; a faded / dim version is an emerging or weakening one; grey means no clear direction. This brightness is a Breaker cue only: the tiers are not drawn brighter or thicker by timeframe.

So when you scan the chart, you're really just scanning for colour agreement across the tiers, and noting how strongly the Breaker backs it.

The three timeframes

The same components are reconstructed on three nested timeframes from a single chart and stacked. Rather than pulling a separate higher-timeframe chart, each slower tier is rebuilt from a rolling window of your current bars, a multiple of your chart timeframe. Ripple is your chart (1×), Wave a few-times-higher view, Tide a much-higher one. Because they're rebuilt on every bar, you watch the higher timeframes form in real time instead of waiting for a higher-timeframe candle to close. On the chart they stack top to bottom: Ripple, then Wave, then Tide.

Ripple · trigger

The top tier, on your current chart timeframe (1×). The fastest and noisiest tier, and the one you actually act on once the slower tiers allow it. The ripple is where entries are timed.

Wave · confirmation

The middle tier (~4× your chart). Its job is to confirm that the intermediate move agrees with the tide. When the wave and tide disagree, you're in a counter-trend correction, usually a time to wait.

Tide · context

The bottom tier, and the slowest (~24× your chart). The tide answers "which way is the dominant trend?" Everything else is conditional on its answer. When the tide flips colour, the regime itself has changed.

The Breaker

The Breaker is a MACD-based momentum filter: the earliest read that momentum has changed sides. On each tier it paints that tier's overbought / oversold rails (the boundary lines of the oscillator), so its colour and strength are always in view.

How to read it

• Colour tells you the side: teal = momentum bull, coral = momentum bear, grey = neutral / undecided.
• Brightness tells you the strength: a bright, saturated rail is a strong momentum state; a faded rail is an emerging or weakening one. A bull that's only faintly teal is just getting going, or running out of steam.
• Thickness follows the tier: a bright, thick Tide Breaker carries far more weight than a bright, thick Ripple Breaker.

In confluence

The Breaker is a filter, not a standalone trigger. Its best use is confirmation: when a faster trigger fires (a Ripple flip), check that the Wave and Tide Breakers are already on the same side. That's momentum backing your entry. A bright Breaker pointing against your trade is a confluence-killer; stand down.

Alerts you can build on it

For any tier, the Breaker exposes: is bull / is bear, flips bull / flips bear, and rising / falling. Common uses:

• Higher-timeframe filter: Wave Breaker is bull AND Tide Breaker is bull as a gate on long entries.
• Early momentum turn: Ripple Breaker flips bull as the first nudge that a low is in.
• Cascade: Ripple Breaker flips, then Wave Breaker agrees, then Tide, momentum spreading up the tiers.

Fathom

Fathom is a price-action oscillator, and it's the indicator's primary entry signal, read mostly on the Ripple (current timeframe). It is smoother and less twitchy than the Breaker. Above its centreline = bullish, below = bearish.

How to read it

• A Fathom flip, a clean cross of the centreline, is the cleanest entry cue the indicator gives. On the Ripple, that flip is your trigger candle.
• Its slope (rising / falling) tells you whether that side is strengthening.
• Near its extremes Fathom also reads overbought / oversold. That's a secondary, weaker take-profit / reversal cue (Ebb/Flow does this job better; see below).

In confluence

Use the Ripple Fathom flip as the trigger, then confirm it against the slower tiers before acting. A Ripple Fathom flip up while the Wave and Tide are rising is a genuine long; the same flip while the higher tiers are falling is to be ignored. If you're already in a trade and Fathom stretches to an extreme, treat it as a hint the move is getting mature.

Alerts you can build on it

Per tier, Fathom exposes: flips bull / flips bear, is bull / is bear, rising / falling, crosses centre up / down, and Level-based above / below for its extremes. The presets use Ripple Fathom flips bull (or bear) as their entry trigger.

Ebb/Flow

Ebb/Flow is a momentum oscillator and the indicator's most responsive directional read. The line is teal when rising and coral when falling, and its outer edges mark overbought and oversold. It's a workhorse: it does several jobs at once.

Its strengths

• Overbought / oversold: when a tier's Ebb/Flow is pinned at an extreme, that timeframe is stretched. Chasing into a heavily overbought reading is how you buy the top.
• Higher-timeframe direction: this is the big one. Whether the Wave and Tide Ebb/Flow are rising or falling tells you if the larger picture is actually behind your trade. Trade with their direction, not against it.
• Entries: because it turns first, it's a strong entry/confirmation layer. The flip side: you generally don't want to go long when one or more tiers are heavily overbought, since even a good trigger is a poor entry into a stretched market.

In confluence

Stack it across tiers. A clean long is the Wave and Tide Ebb/Flow rising (higher-timeframe momentum up), the Ripple turning up to trigger, and no tier sitting deep in overbought. Because Ebb/Flow leads, agreement here is high-quality confirmation; disagreement (e.g. Tide Ebb/Flow falling) is a strong reason to pass.

Alerts you can build on it

Per tier, Ebb/Flow exposes: rising / falling, is bull / is bear, crosses centre up / down, enters / exits overbought / oversold, and Level-based above / below and inside / outside a zone. Common uses:

• Confirmation: Wave Ebb/Flow rising AND Tide Ebb/Flow rising (used in the presets).
• Don't-chase filter: combine your entry with NOT Ripple Ebb/Flow overbought to block longs into a stretched tape (see logic modes below).
• Reversal heads-up: Tide Ebb/Flow exits overbought as an early warning the dominant move is cooling.

The bands

The bands are smoothed price envelopes drawn over your candles, one per tier. The midline's slope colours each band teal (rising) or coral (falling), and the Tide band is the thickest. They're your dynamic trend lines.

Trading with the trend

• In an uptrend the rising band is support: price holding above it means the trend is intact. Pullbacks into the band that hold are continuation entries in the trend's direction.
• A break below the band (in an uptrend) is the trend coming into question: tighten up or step aside. The reverse in a downtrend.
• Lean on the higher bands for the big picture: price above all three rising bands is about as clean as an uptrend gets. Treat the Tide band as your line in the sand.
• Squeeze vs expansion: when a band compresses (a squeeze), volatility is low and the market is coiling; breakouts often follow. An expanding band means a move is underway.

Alerts you can build on it

Per tier, the band exposes: price above / below / inside band, price breaks above / below band, band rising / falling, and band flips up / down. For example, the third preset adds an OR slot, Tide band: price above band OR Tide band rising, so the long only arms while the dominant band is supportive.

Confluence & confirmation

No single line is a trade. Alignment is. Everything above is designed to be stacked, and the indicator gives you ready-made ways to measure agreement:

• All teal / all coral across the tiers = aligned trend, trade that side only. Mixed colours = the market is arguing with itself; sit out.
• Tier triple: a tier's Breaker, Fathom and Ebb/Flow all on the same side is the strongest single-tier confirmation.
• 2-of-3: any two of a tier's three components agreeing is a softer "mostly aligned" read (the presets use this for the Wave and Tide).
• HTF aligned: the Wave and Tide agreeing is the classic higher-timeframe filter on a faster trigger.

The approach that runs through all of it: trigger on the Ripple (a Fathom or Ebb/Flow flip), confirm on the Wave and Tide (rising, Breakers aligned, price with the bands), and veto on extremes (don't chase a heavily overbought tape; respect a thick, bright exhaustion Breaker). The alert builder lets you encode exactly that.

The alert system

There are two ways to get alerts: load a preset in one click, or build your own with the slots. Either way, no code: it's all dropdowns.

Slots

There are 14 slots: 7 for entries, 7 for exits. Each slot holds up to three conditions combined by one logic mode. A condition is built from three dropdowns:

• Operand: what to watch: a price (open/high/low/close), or a tier's Breaker, Fathom, Ebb/Flow or Band.
• Operator: how it must behave: is bull / is bear, rising / falling, flips bull / flips bear, crosses centre, crosses / above / below a Level, inside a zone, price above / below / breaks a band, and so on.
• Levels: each slot has two numeric Levels (Level 1 defaults to +30, Level 2 to −30), which line up with the overbought / oversold rails. Operators like "crosses Level 1 up" or "above Level 1" read against them.

Logic modes

• AND: all conditions in the slot must be true.
• OR: at least one is true.
• 2-of-3: any two of three are true (great for "mostly aligned").
• NOT (per condition): each condition has its own NOT toggle that inverts it. Combine AND with a NOT'd condition to get an "AND NOT" filter: fire on the setup, but not while a chosen condition is true, e.g. "enter on the flip, but not while the Ripple is overbought."

How slots combine

Within a slot, your logic mode applies. Across a side, every active (enabled, configured) slot is AND-ed together, so each slot is a layer the setup must satisfy. One TradingView alert covers the whole Entry side, another the whole Exit side. Empty or disabled slots are simply ignored, and a fresh install fires nothing until you opt in.

Fire mode

One toggle, "Fire once per signal," controls how often an alert repeats:

• On (edge): fires only on the bar your conditions first become true. One clean signal per setup.
• Off (level): fires on every bar the conditions stay true.

There's also an optional session filter that can gate all alerts to a chosen time-of-day window.

The six presets

If you'd rather not build from scratch, pick a preset and you're ready to set the alert. There are six: three setups, each in a long ▲ and short ▼ version. They're entry-only, so the fire-mode toggle stays in your control.

A ripple trigger confirmed by higher-timeframe momentum on both slower tiers. The short version mirrors it (flips bear · Wave & Tide Ebb/Flow falling).

The same stack, but it only arms while the dominant Tide band is supportive (price above it, or it's rising). The short version mirrors it.

A ripple trigger, confirmed by "mostly aligned" Wave and "mostly aligned" Tide: a strong, broad confluence entry. The short version mirrors it.

Setting up TradingView alerts

Configure your slots (or load a preset / paste a share code), then on the chart with the indicator loaded, create the alert:

1. Right-click the indicator (or use the ⋯ menu) and choose Add alert on Trade Symbiotic.
2. In the condition dropdown, pick Entry alert or Exit alert.
3. Choose how you want to be notified: popup, app push, email, SMS or webhook.
4. Save. Repeat for the other side, and for each ticker / timeframe you want covered.

That's it: one alert covers your entire Entry configuration and one covers your Exit configuration. Re-tune your slots whenever you like, and the same alert reflects the change, no need to recreate it.

Share codes & the Sandbox

The on-site Sandbox is a full builder for the alert system. Assemble a setup there, copy its share code (it starts with TS1), and paste it into the indicator's Sandbox code field. It configures all 14 slots at once.

While a share code is present it takes precedence over both a chosen preset and the manual dropdowns. Clear the field to hand control back to the dropdowns. It's the fastest way to move a setup from the Sandbox onto your chart, or to share a configuration with someone else.

Glossary

These are the terms Trade Symbiotic uses on the chart. Ripple, Wave and Tide are this indicator's names for its three tiers, and Breaker, Fathom and Ebb/Flow its three momentum reads. The names echo Dow Theory, which describes primary, secondary and minor movements; here they refer to specific tiers of this indicator. The last five entries are ordinary category terms, defined the way this documentation uses them.

Ripple

The fast tier: your current chart timeframe (1×). Where entries are triggered.

Wave

The intermediate tier: a higher view of your chart (~4× by default). The confirmation timeframe, reconstructed from your current bars.

Tide

The slow tier: a much-higher view of your chart (~24× by default). The dominant-trend / context timeframe, reconstructed from your current bars.

Multiplier / auto-detect

Each tier is a multiple of your chart timeframe (Ripple 1×), reconstructed from your current bars. Auto-detect (on by default) picks the Wave and Tide multipliers to fit the chart; turn it off to set them yourself.

Non-repainting

Readings on closed bars stay fixed; only the live forming bar updates. Past signals are never rewritten, even though the higher tiers update every bar in real time. How to test this on any indicator.

Breaker

A MACD-based momentum filter; colours each tier's overbought/oversold rails. Brightness shows strength.

Fathom

A price-action oscillator; the primary entry trigger (mostly on the Ripple). A centreline "flip" is the cue.

Ebb/Flow

A momentum oscillator; the most responsive read. Marks overbought/oversold and higher-timeframe direction.

Band

A smoothed price envelope per tier; a dynamic trend line. Tide band is thickest.

Flip

A component crossing its centreline / changing side: bull to bear or vice versa.

Overbought / oversold

A tier stretched to its outer edge: caution against chasing.

Slot

A configured combination of up to three conditions plus a logic mode. 7 entry, 7 exit.

Aligned

Multiple tiers (or a tier's components) the same colour at once: confluence.

Fire mode

Whether an alert fires once on entry (edge) or every bar the conditions hold (level).

Higher timeframe (HTF)

Any chart period slower than the one you are trading: a 4-hour read while you work a 1-hour chart. Here the higher timeframes are the Wave and Tide. Wave and Tide are rebuilt from a rolling window of your own bars, so they are a live approximation of those higher timeframes, not a copy of the higher-timeframe chart. That is what lets you watch them form; it also means they will not match a 4-hour chart tick for tick.

Leading / lagging

A lagging read updates only at the higher-timeframe close, so between closes it is stale. "Leading" means you see it form earlier. It is not a prediction of price, and not a promise of results.

Confluence

Two or more independent reads pointing the same way at the same moment. Here it usually means all three tiers agreeing. That is an aligned reading, not a probability statement.

Overlay vs oscillator

An overlay draws on the price panel and answers where trend sits and where price is relative to it: here, the bands. An oscillator draws in its own panel below and answers how stretched a tier is and which way its momentum is turning: here, Fathom and Ebb/Flow. Both come from one engine, so they cannot define trend differently.

Session filter

An optional time-of-day window, in your timezone, outside which no alert fires. It gates notification, not calculation: the indicator keeps computing exactly as normal, you simply are not told.

Tuning the timeframes

By default the indicator auto-detects your chart's timeframe and tunes its Wave and Tide multipliers to suit it, so you rarely need to touch anything; Ripple always stays at 1× (your chart). A built-in table maps each common timeframe to sensible multipliers, and the same multiplier approach drives both the oscillator tiers and the overlay bands. With auto-detect off, the indicator falls back to fixed multipliers of 1× / 4× / 24× (Ripple / Wave / Tide), and you can set your own.

How auto-detect picks the multipliers

With auto-detect on, the indicator reads your chart's timeframe and looks up Wave and Tide multipliers built for it. Ripple is always 1× (your chart). A few real entries from that table:

• 5m: Wave 6×, Tide 24×
• 15m: Wave 4×, Tide 16×
• 30m: Wave 6×, Tide 24×
• 1h: Wave 4×, Tide 24×
• 4h: Wave 6×, Tide 42×
• 1D: Wave 7×, Tide 30×
• 1W: Wave 4×, Tide 26×

So on a 1-hour chart the Wave behaves like a roughly 4-hour view and the Tide like a roughly daily one, rebuilt from your hourly bars, not pulled from a separate chart. The same multipliers drive both the oscillator tiers and the overlay bands, so price and oscillator always speak about the same three timeframes. Switch chart timeframe and the tiers re-tune automatically.

Whichever multipliers you run, the mechanism is the same: each slower tier is a multiple of your current timeframe, reconstructed from your bars and recomputed every bar. That's why you can watch the Wave and Tide form continuously instead of only at their candle closes.

Changelog

Notable changes. The version number is shown in the indicator's settings panel.

• v1.1: Modular alert builder: 14 slots, AND / OR / 2-of-3 + per-condition NOT, six presets, share codes, session filter, fire-mode toggle, and two colour pickers.
• v1.0: Initial release: three-tier bands, Breaker, Fathom and Ebb/Flow across Ripple / Wave / Tide.