Credits & Attribution

What this page is

Every indicator has an author. Somebody sat down, worked out that comparing the size of recent up-moves with recent down-moves would say something useful, published it, and the industry adopted it. This page lists all 276 grouped by that person, so you see whole bodies of work at once rather than one entry at a time.

The grouping is the point. Sorted by what an indicator measures, as the five category pages sort them, the Roofing Filter, the Super Smoother, the Laguerre RSI and the MESA Adaptive Moving Average are scattered across three pages. Sorted by author they are one block, and it becomes obvious that a whole family of what this chart can do came out of one engineer applying signal processing to price.

Every credit that can carry a citation now does. Under each author sits the actual reference — Wilder's 1978 book, the issue of Technical Analysis of Stocks & Commodities an indicator first appeared in, the Journal of Business paper behind a volatility estimator — with a link that goes straight to it. 183 of the 276 have one. The other 93 are the studies with no single originator, and they say so instead.

Two views of the same thing, because they answer different questions. By author shows you a body of work: every one of Ehlers' seventeen studies in one block, which the five category pages can never show because they sort by what an indicator measures. The A–Z index is the lookup — one row per indicator, with what we call it, what its inventor called it, who that was, and the reference. That second column matters more than it sounds: this chart draws ALMA as Gaussian Weighted Moving Average and the Hull as Lag-Reduced Moving Average, so without the published name a citation cannot be matched to the line on your screen.

The software credits split two ways, and the page is careful about which is which. Two of the five are shipped — their code runs in your browser. TradingView's Lightweight Charts™ draws the preview chart on the Script page and the chart on one experimental page; TA-Lib is compiled into the indicator engine your browser downloads and computes the classic indicators it already implements, such as RSI, MACD and ATR. The other three are libraries we do not ship at all: our own implementations were written against them and verified against their output, quirk for quirk, which is a real debt even though none of their code runs here.

Under those sits the licence accounting. Every open-source component here is used on its own licence's terms, and each licence asks for something specific — Apache 2.0 wants its notice kept and, in TradingView's case, an attribution and a link on a page you can actually reach; BSD 3-Clause wants its notice reproduced in the documentation; MIT and ISC want their permission notice carried along. The page lists what each one asks for and where it is met, so you can check it rather than take a compliance claim on trust.

A handful of studies genuinely have no author to name. Simple moving averages, price momentum, the price transforms, floor-trader pivots and the plain candle-anatomy ratios are older than the practice of attributing them, or are arithmetic too basic to be anybody's invention. Those are listed as classical rather than credited to whoever first wrote them down, because a confident wrong name is worse than an honest blank.

The block at the top is the original work, and it starts with the two chart engines. Karela and KNv2-LW are written from scratch in C++ and compiled to WebAssembly, so no outside charting library draws the Chart page — the conventions they follow came from studying TradingView, but none of their code did. Under them sit the KA indicators, the three forward range projections, the swing detection engine every detector is built on, the Smart Money Concepts detectors, the chart-pattern detection and scan, both Elliott Wave engines, the Dr Live analytics, every Floor Sheet filter and the broker analysis. Where one of those builds on somebody else's idea, the line under its heading says which part is theirs and which part is ours.

Why it helps you

When to use it, and where to find it

• Read it once, early, to get a feel for who built the toolbox you are using. It makes the rest of the documentation read very differently.
• Come back when you want to go deeper on one approach. Find the author of an indicator that works for you, and read everything else under their heading.
• Open it if you are wondering whether a study is respectable. A named originator and a first publication is a much better sign than an anonymous script.

Try it — a short walkthrough

1. 1
   Find who made one you use

   Type an indicator name into the search box. The block that survives is its author, with everything else they contributed listed beside it, and the publication it came from underneath.
2. 2
   Read one author's whole set

   Type a surname instead — Ehlers, Wilder, Chande, Williams. You get every indicator that person is behind in one list, with a reference for each separate thing they published.
3. 3
   Look one up by name, either name

   Switch to A–Z index. One row per indicator: what we call it, what it was published as, who published it, and the reference. Search matches all four, so "Percent Range" and "Williams %R" both land on the same row.
4. 4
   Go and read the original

   Click the reference. Every link on this page was opened and checked before it was printed, and where a source has no reachable page the reference is still given — as text, with no link, rather than a plausible-looking dead one.
5. 5
   Check the licences

   Read The software. The Lightweight Charts™ attribution notice is printed there in full, the TA-Lib BSD 3-Clause notice opens underneath it, and How we meet the licences lists what each licence asks for beside where it is done.
6. 6
   Go back to the study itself

   Take a name from here to its category page and click its preview. The full-size picture carries the same credit above the description, plus a line-by-line account of what it draws.

Every part, up close

The Chart page — nearly everything reachable from this screen is credited on this page. Each part with a close-up of the real screen; the numbers match the dots on the picture.

1

The fx catalogue

Its 276 entries are credited here by author, and each also carries its inventor on its own row in the five indicator category pages.

2

Somebody worked this out

A line on your candles is arithmetic a specific person published, usually decades ago. This page is where that person is named.

Who invented these

TradingView Lightweight Charts™
Copyright (c) 2025 TradingView, Inc. https://www.tradingview.com/

TradingView Lightweight Charts™ v5.2.1
Copyright (c) 2026 TradingView, Inc.
Licensed under Apache License 2.0 https://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0

Copyright (c) 1999-2025, Mario Fortier

Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions are met:

1. Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer.

2. Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution.

3. Neither the name of the copyright holder nor the names of its contributors may be used to endorse or promote products derived from this software without specific prior written permission.

THIS SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED BY THE COPYRIGHT HOLDERS AND CONTRIBUTORS "AS IS" AND ANY EXPRESS OR IMPLIED WARRANTIES, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE ARE DISCLAIMED. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE COPYRIGHT HOLDER OR CONTRIBUTORS BE LIABLE FOR ANY DIRECT, INDIRECT, INCIDENTAL, SPECIAL, EXEMPLARY, OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES (INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, PROCUREMENT OF SUBSTITUTE GOODS OR SERVICES; LOSS OF USE, DATA, OR PROFITS; OR BUSINESS INTERRUPTION) HOWEVER CAUSED AND ON ANY THEORY OF LIABILITY, WHETHER IN CONTRACT, STRICT LIABILITY, OR TORT (INCLUDING NEGLIGENCE OR OTHERWISE) ARISING IN ANY WAY OUT OF THE USE OF THIS SOFTWARE, EVEN IF ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGE.

What it does not do

• A link is a pointer, not a paywall pass. Several of these references are books you have to buy and magazine articles the publisher sells; the link goes to the catalogue entry or the publisher's page for the issue, which is enough to find it in a library, not enough to read it for free.
• Where no primary source could be verified, the reference says so in as many words rather than quietly citing the best-looking secondary account as though it were the original. SuperTrend, the Pretty Good Oscillator, the Herrick Payoff Index and the ATR form of the Keltner Channel are all in that position, and each one's citation admits it.
• A first publication date is not always a first invention date. Several of these circulated on trading floors for years before anyone wrote them up, and the credit here is to whoever published, which is the only thing that can be checked.
• Where a study has several plausible originators it is credited to the one the published record supports, with the alternative left out rather than hedged. A few genuinely contested ones say "commonly attributed to", and that wording is deliberate.
• The classical and trading community headings are honest admissions, not placeholders. Nobody knows who first drew a simple moving average, and we would rather say so than pick a name.
• One credit is openly unfinished. E_RSI and RSI Amp were adapted from an open-source TradingView script and we have not yet identified its author, so the page says so instead of either claiming the work or quietly leaving it unlabelled.
• The page opens by calling this the first Nepali charting engine written in C++. That claim is the author speaking about his own work — there is no register of such things to check it against, and nothing in this documentation verifies it. Everything else on the page is checkable against a publication.
• The candle-pattern detectors are not in the original-work block. Those shapes and their detection are long-established Japanese candlestick analysis, and only the marks listed at the top of this page are ours.

Questions people ask