I changed the ‘timeframe’ setting and now my indicator displays ‘Ø’

Some TradingView indicators have a ‘timeframe’ setting, which enables MTF functionality. This setting allows you to calculate the indicator on a timeframe that is different from the one you currently have on the chart. You can read more about MTF functionality in our Help Center.

If the 'timeframe' setting is set to the timeframe higher than the one on the chart and the "Wait for timeframe closes" option is turned on, the indicator's plots will return Ø on most bars instead of a numerical value. To demonstrate, let’s start by opening a 1m chart and adding a Moving Average (MA) indicator that calculates based on the data from the 5m timeframe. Here’s how it’ll look:

As you can see in the top left corner, the MA indicator displays Ø instead of a numerical value. But why does this happen?

When the indicator requests the data from the 5m timeframe, it gets one MA value for each of the five minutes. On the chart, one bar is equal to 1m of time, so we have five times as much data for the chart itself than for the indicator. Effectively, for each of the five bars, we can only have one MA value.

In order to draw the indicator in this case, we attach the MA values to every fifth bar and then connect them with a straight line. In the end, we get a relatively smooth MA where every fifth bar has an associated MA value, whereas all bars in between don't - they display Ø instead.

If you change the style of the indicator to Line With Breaks in its settings, you’ll see where the actual values are located. With this style, the values will no longer be connected by lines.

On real-time data, the indicator will be drawn only up to the last available closed bar of the indicator’s timeframe. In our example, the MA values will lag 1-4 bars behind the chart, because the 5m bar that the indicator is based on has not yet closed. A new value will appear as soon as the 5m bar closes, so it will happen once every five minutes.