TradingView, CoinMarketCap and CoinGecko: How to Use Them and Which to Pick

TradingView, CoinMarketCap and CoinGecko are three free services that almost everyone who follows the crypto market ends up using one way or another. The first is for charts and technical analysis; the other two are where you look up coin data. In this lesson we'll look at what each one does, how to read their numbers without getting fooled, and how to combine them into a simple daily routine.

Three services for three jobs

Beginners often mix these sites up, since they all show a price and a chart. But they do very different jobs. TradingView helps you see where the price is heading and where the key levels are. CoinMarketCap and CoinGecko tell you what the coin actually is, how many coins exist and which exchanges trade it.

CoinMarketCap launched in 2013 and has been owned by Binance since 2020, while CoinGecko was founded in 2014 and is still independent. Both aggregators pull data from hundreds of exchanges, but each one filters out suspicious volume its own way, so their numbers can differ quite a bit. That's nothing to worry about; in fact, the gap itself is a useful signal.

All three services have free versions, and for a beginner they're more than enough. Paid TradingView plans give you more indicators per chart and more alerts, while paid API access on the aggregators is mainly for developers. Only pay for a subscription once you've run into a specific limit.

TradingView: your first working chart

TradingView isn't just for crypto: you can pull up stocks, forex and indices too, and view the same coin with price feeds from different exchanges. Pay attention to the source next to the ticker: BTCUSDT on Binance and BTCUSD on Coinbase will differ slightly in both price and volume.

Learn the basics right away: timeframes, lines and levels, indicators and alerts. An alert is a notification sent to your phone or email the moment price touches a level you've picked, and it saves you from staring at the screen for hours. The indicators themselves and their settings are covered in detail in the lesson on MA, RSI and MACD indicators.

Save your markup. TradingView lets you keep several watchlists and chart templates, so you don't have to set everything up from scratch for each coin. After a couple of weeks you'll see which levels held and which ones price ignored, and your markup will get sharper. That's far more useful than starting from a blank chart every day.

TradingView also has an Ideas section where traders publish their analysis. It's worth browsing to see how other people mark up a chart. But remember that the author of an idea isn't accountable for anything, and sometimes the most hyped posts stand out for nothing but their confidence.

1. Open a pair such as BTCUSDT and check which exchange the price feed comes from.
2. Pick a timeframe: daily for the big picture, 4-hour for the details.
3. Mark a couple of clear highs and lows with horizontal lines.
4. Add one moving average. Start with no more than two indicators.
5. Set an alert on the nearest level and close the tab.

CoinMarketCap and CoinGecko: how to read a coin page

A coin page looks much the same on either aggregator: price and 24-hour change at the top, key metrics below that, and further down a tab with exchanges and trading pairs. The page also lists the official website, the project's documentation and the contract addresses on every network where the token is issued.

Start with the supply data and compare how many coins are already circulating with how many will exist in the end. If only a small slice of the future supply is in circulation, today's market cap is just the tip of the iceberg: the rest of the tokens will still hit the market, and some of the people who get them will want to sell. Aggregators often link to the unlock schedule, or to the docs that describe it, right on that page.

How to properly interpret market cap and trading volume is covered in detail in a Level 4 lesson. For now, it's enough to know what each field means and not mix up numbers that look alike.

Also check the sections beginners tend to skip: exchange rankings with trust and liquidity scores, categories like DeFi or gaming tokens, and lists of recently added coins. That last group is especially risky: these projects have neither a track record nor steady demand.

• Market cap is the price multiplied by the number of coins in circulation.
• Fully diluted valuation (FDV) is the price multiplied by the maximum or total supply.
• Circulating supply is how many coins are already in circulation.
• Total and max supply are how many coins have been issued in total and the most that can ever be issued.
• Volume 24h is the trading volume over the past day across all tracked exchanges.
• Markets is the list of exchanges and pairs where the coin trades, with volume for each.

How not to fall for pretty numbers

Trading volume is easy to fake: some exchanges and projects trade with themselves to make a coin look popular. Aggregators fight this in different ways, so compare the volume on CoinMarketCap and CoinGecko and look at the exchanges tab. Is almost all the volume coming from one obscure exchange? That's a red flag.

The second trap is fake tokens with the same name and ticker. Anyone can issue a token under a well-known project's name. The only reliable identifier is the contract address, and you should copy it from the aggregator page or the project's official website. You'll find more warning signs in the lesson on scam projects.

The third trap is low liquidity. The market cap on the page may look impressive, but if trading volume is tiny, you won't be able to sell even a small amount at the listed price. The price on an aggregator is just the last trade, not a promise that you'll get it.

Finally, an aggregator updates its data with a slight delay and averages it across many exchanges. That's fine for the big picture, but you're better off timing your entries and exits from the chart and order book of the exchange where you actually trade.

A ten-minute daily routine

Here's an order that works well. In the morning, open an aggregator to get the big picture: how the major coins are moving, where Bitcoin dominance stands, which categories are up or down. Then switch to your TradingView watchlist and check whether price has reached any of the levels you marked. Your alerts will handle the rest of the day.

Stumbled on a new coin? Then flip the order: first the aggregator page, where you check supply, FDV, exchanges and the contract, and only then the chart. Otherwise you'll waste time running technical analysis on an asset that barely trades. For deeper research there are specialized services, covered in the lesson on analytics platforms for the crypto market.

Over time you'll build your own system: watchlists in the aggregator apps, chart templates in TradingView, separate alerts for long-term and short-term ideas. The main thing is that your tools save you time instead of turning every morning into endless chart scrolling.