Pine Script tutorial: from your first script to MT5 orders.

Pine Script runs on TradingView’s servers: you write it in the Pine Editor, press compile, and the script draws on the chart or simulates trades. Two script types matter for automation. An indicator only draws or calculates. A strategy declares entries and exits, so TradingView can backtest them bar by bar and fire alerts when the conditions trigger live.

For automation, the strategy is the one you want: its alerts are the bridge between what you designed and what your broker executes.

Open the Pine Editor at the bottom of any chart, paste this and press compile:

//@version=6
indicator("SMA 50", overlay=true)
plot(ta.sma(close, 50))

Three lines: declare the script, give it a name, draw the 50-period simple moving average over the price. From here, everything you will ever build is this same shape: inputs, a calculation, and something to show or to trade.

Change the declaration to strategy() and add a rule that opens a position. A minimal crossover example:

//@version=6
strategy("SMA cross", overlay=true)
fast = ta.sma(close, 50)
slow = ta.sma(close, 200)
if ta.crossover(fast, slow)
    strategy.entry("Long", strategy.long)
if ta.crossunder(fast, slow)
    strategy.close("Long")

Now the Strategy Tester tab fills with trades: every crossover bought, every crossunder closed. That tester is where you add costs and find out the strategy is not as good as it looked on the chart — which is the point.

Three things turn a pretty backtest into an honest one. Commission and slippage in the strategy properties — without them every result is fiction. Enough history — a few months proves nothing. And the repainting trap: a script repaints when its past values change after the fact because it used information that did not exist at that bar’s close. A repainting strategy looks brilliant in the tester and dies live. Test the same logic with bar replay, and verify the signals on a demo before real money.

Once the strategy behaves, add alert messages: TradingView can send the order as JSON every time an entry or exit triggers. A webhook alert with a body like this is all a bridge needs:

{
  "symbol": "{{ticker}}",
  "action": "{{strategy.order.action}}",
  "lot": 0.1
}

The placeholders fill in the symbol and the direction automatically. One alert now covers every chart the strategy runs on.

Pine cannot reach your broker: it lives inside TradingView. The last hop is a bridge — a webhook receiver plus an EA inside your MetaTrader 5 that executes each alert on your account. With SignalForge the setup is four steps (register the account, install the EA, paste the webhook URL, test on demo) and the median time from alert to confirmed order in our 19-23 September 2026 measurements was about 0.5 s. The full walkthrough: how to copy TradingView signals into MT5.

If writing the strategy itself is the part you would rather skip, the Script Builder turns plain-language rules into Pine and our AI Pine script generator guide covers that route in depth; converting an existing script into a tradeable one is covered in Pine Script to EA.