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Candle colours for colour blind traders: changing the defaults on MT5 and TradingView

Roughly 8% of men and around 0.5% of women have some form of red green colour vision deficiency, which is about one man in twelve. Many platforms default to green for up candles and red for down candles, which is the one pair these traders find hardest to separate. Plenty of people just live with it, and some misread direction on a small chart or a screenshot.

Changes that help. Pick two colours that differ in brightness as well as hue, like white and a dark blue, or blue and orange. Better still, use shape: hollow bodies for up candles and filled bodies for down candles, so direction doesn't depend on colour at all.

On MT5, press F8 to open the chart properties, go to the Colors tab, and set Bull candle and Bear candle colours, plus the outline colours. On TradingView, open the chart settings, go to Symbol, and change Body, Border and Wick for up and down. TradingView also has a Hollow candles chart type where up candles are hollow and down candles are filled.

The same issue appears in indicator histograms that switch between green and red, and in profit columns. If you build indicators, offering a colour input costs a line of code and helps more people than you'd expect.

Thanks for raising this, it is rarely discussed. Hollow versus filled candles is the most robust option because it works even in black and white screenshots. On MT5 that means setting the bull candle colour to the background and keeping the outline visible. A second tip: use the same scheme on every device, phone included. Switching between colour schemes on different screens is where misreading direction tends to happen.

Which combinations work depends on the type of colour vision deficiency, so what works for one person may not for another. Blue and orange tend to be separable by most people with red green deficiency, and white against black works for nearly everyone. I'd like to hear what others use, particularly any combination that holds up on a dark chart background, where bright colours bleed into each other. If you have a colour scheme that works for you, a screenshot with the hex codes would help anyone looking to copy it. Describing it in words is useful too, since a screenshot can be hard to read for the same reason.

I'm one of the one in twelve and it took me an embarrassingly long time to admit it was affecting my trading. On small charts, especially on my phone, the default red and green candles blended together enough that I misread direction a few times, once on a quick exit where I closed a winner thinking it had turned against me.

What works for me now is hollow up candles and solid dark blue down candles on a light grey background. On dark backgrounds I found most colour pairs bled into each other, as you say, so I gave up on dark themes completely. The shape difference does most of the work and the colour is just a bonus.

The thing nobody warned me about was indicators. My volume histogram and an oscillator I use both switched between red and green by default, and I'd changed the candles but forgotten those for months. Going through every indicator's colour settings once and saving it all as a template made a real difference.

On TradingView, a quick way to test is the Hollow candles chart type. Up candles are hollow (close above open) and down candles are filled, so a quick look at the fill tells you the direction without needing to see the colour. It's a little odd at first, since a candle that closes above the previous close but below its own open will be filled. For some, the better setup is regular candles with a thick border and strong contrast between the two body colours. Both can be saved as a chart template, so every new chart loads with the settings, which saves redoing it each time. Saving the settings as a template means every new chart opens with them, in MT5 through the template menu and on TradingView by saving the layout.

Indicators are a second place to check. A histogram like MACD uses up to four shades of two colours, such as dark green, light green, dark red and light red, to mark rising and falling momentum. For a red green deficient trader, that's four shades of one muddy colour. Changing the colours to blue and orange pairs, with dark and light for each, keeps the information. Many indicators let you set the colours in their inputs or style tab. For custom indicators, if there are no colour inputs, a short note to the author asking for them is a reasonable request that is often added.

When you post a screenshot, add text that doesn't depend on colour. Write long or short, the entry price, the stop and the target in the caption or on the chart as labels. Someone with colour vision deficiency, or someone reading on a small phone in sunlight, can then follow the trade. It takes ten seconds and it makes the post readable for more people. It also helps your own review later, since you won't have to guess what the colours meant. Labels on the chart for entries and exits, drawn as text, also survive being reformatted or converted to black and white.