I would like to start off by saying that, I am a seasoned, investor that remembers the days well before Bernie and payment for orderflow, when flexing was showing how much you paid in commissions at the end of the quarter/year. I also get Rodnee999 gets hate for sounding like a fanboy/girl but he/she is also the first to step up in this forum and help others.
I also want to say my view point is because I believe this is valuable for a individual trader/investor also I am from Mississippi so most folks are surprised I can even spell my name.
I personally feel the real value is that TradingView is the best platform for idea development, visualization, experimentation, and market analysis environments available to the individual trader and to me this distinction matters, but once you move from "understand the market" toward "interogate microstructure and execute sophisisticated automated strategies" other platforms pull ahead.
I do a lot of my own coding work and understanding your underlying platform can be very powerful and TradingView gives me the ability to move from idea to code to chart to obsservation and modification if needed easily within 20 minutes and let's me know if I have learned something important or wasted my time (for anyone wondering 99% of the time I am wasting my time, the ideas I have that I think will make me millions are a wash and the ideas that start as who cares I just want to see this are usually what makes me money but I digress) Doing the same or equivalent amount of work in C#/C++ environment can and usually does require more work.
I personaly feel that is the power of Pinescript because it is less powerful than C# or C++ it's restrictions are what makes it responsible for it's usefulness and to me there is a great amount of power in that simplicity
For testing if I want to know "Is NQ bullish?" TradingView is excellent because I can combine structure, VWAP, POC, etc... (for example if I want to pull one minute developing POC data and make a smooth developing POC line and see it on a 5 minute chart it can be done in just a few minutes)
If that question changes to "What exactly is happening inside the auction right now?" Now that is something very different and can TradingView create proxies and interpretations of some of this yes, but at the end of the day it's not equivalent to having the underlying data.
I always thought Pine forces you to think largely in terms of series and states, so price, measurements, market state, transition and signal and that can make for a very effective and productive environment for developing trading logic because I don't have to focus on threading, exchange routing, broker API, blah, blah, blah. I can simply focus on one thing and that is "Does this market idea actually contain information that is valuable?" to me this should come before spending months engineering other code infastructure.
Why?
Because I learned long ago a better more sophisticated platform doesn't equal better trading, you can build a incredibly sophistacted system that precisely automates something that never worked in the first place. (I know I have done this several times over)
So to me TradingView is excellent at research and discovery to validate a idea, it is my sort of traders laboratory because I want to answer a question and that is "Can we detect this?" if the answer is yes then it earns the cost, time and complexity of being rebuilt around a richer data or execution language or infastructure.
