How to use price alerts

Price alerts trigger when the price surpasses or reaches a particular price mark. They're especially useful for price action strategies, where the focus is on pure price movement — the core of technical analysis — without relying on indicators or other tools.

Price-based strategies use price as the starting — and almost always the ending — point for the decisions about whether entering or exiting the trade is worth it. To know which price levels currently play the most crucial role for a particular asset, you can use different technical analysis tools including trend lines, candlestick and chart patterns, price-based chart types, and others.

Knowing how to configure TradingView alerts is crucial to making informed and timely decisions. Both price and technical alerts use different operators, which define the limit for how many alerts you can have at once.

For an alert to function as a price alert, remember to set the condition to "Price." Then select one of the following operators:

Crossing: Triggers when the price reaches a specific threshold from either direction
Crossing up: Triggers when the price reaches a specific threshold from bottom to top
Crossing down: Triggers when the price reaches a specific threshold from top to bottom
Greater than: Triggers when the price rises above a specified threshold by at least one minimum tick
Less than: Triggers when the price falls below a specified threshold by at least one minimum tick

! Tip: You can often save technical alerts by using price alerts instead. For example, rather than setting an alert on a trend line drawing, place a simple Crossing alert — freeing up your technical alerts for more complex setups.

For instance, you may be a trend trader. You open the META chart and see that the price has struggled to break the $600 resistance level several times so you expect a further pullback. You can place an alert with the "Crossing up" operator, which informs you that the price has surpassed the previous level and the trend may have changed. Even if the price is higher than before, it may go much higher.

Also, price alerts work for Fibonacci trading — a pure price-based strategy, which involves using Fib retracement levels as possible levels the price can reach. Here, do the same as with the trend lines — identify the zone and place the alert with the desired operator.

The bottom line

Knowing alerts is a crucial part of trading, as being promptly informed about market changes is what defines a successful trade. Both price and technical alerts can help you react in a timely manner and stay updated on market conditions. But they are just a fragment of what our platform offers. We encourage you to study drawing tools and various chart types and find your trading configurations for each asset type you can trade with us.