TradingView alert not firing: the six things to check

An alert that never fires is almost never a broken alert. It is usually an alert watching the wrong thing, or one that has quietly expired. Work through these in order - they are listed by how often each one turns out to be the cause.

1. The alert is watching the chart, not the indicator

When you create an alert, the Condition dropdown defaults to the symbol. If it says the ticker rather than the indicator's name, the alert is waiting on a price condition that may never occur. Open the alert, set Condition to the indicator itself, and set the trigger to Any alert() function call.

2. It expired

On the cheaper TradingView plans, alerts have an expiry date. They stop silently - no email, no banner. Open the alerts panel and look for a greyed-out entry or a past date in the expiry column. See alerts that stop after a few weeks.

3. The chart timeframe changed

An alert is bound to the timeframe it was created on. If you created it on one timeframe and later changed the chart, the alert still watches the original - which may be correct, but is worth confirming rather than assuming.

4. The alert is paused

The alerts panel has a small toggle per alert. It is easy to catch by accident while scrolling on a phone. A paused alert looks almost identical to an active one.

5. There was genuinely no signal

Worth saying plainly, because it is often the answer: a selective strategy has quiet days by design. Before debugging, check whether the conditions for a signal were actually present. A day with no trade is not a fault.

6. Browser tab, not the cloud

TradingView alerts run server-side, so your laptop can be closed - but only once the alert is created and saved. An alert you were mid-way through configuring when you shut the tab does not exist.