1. Alerts Overview

Alerts watch the market for you. Instead of staring at a chart waiting for a level to break, you define a condition once and Fractal Chart notifies you the moment it is met — whether that is a price crossing a number, a price crossing an indicator, or one indicator crossing another.

Where alerts live

Alerts have two homes that stay in sync:

• The Alerts sidebar — open it with the bell button in the toolbar. It opens in the same side slot as the watchlist, so only one side panel is shown at a time. The sidebar has two tabs:
  • Alerts — your alert rules, each shown as a row with its status and a hover menu of actions.
  • Log — a history of alerts that have fired, newest first (see Notifications, Triggered Log & Managing Alerts).
  • A small toolbar across the top lets you create (+), search, and sort your alerts.
• The chart itself — price-based alerts are drawn as horizontal lines directly on the chart, and you can create one straight from the price axis. See Creating & Editing Alerts.

What an alert is made of

Every alert pairs an instrument with a rule and how you want to be told:

• Instrument — the symbol and provider the alert watches (for example AAPL on Massive, BTCUSDT on Binance, or BTC-USDT on OKX).
• Condition — what must happen, expressed as a comparison such as Price Crossing 4,200 or Price Crossing VWAP. Conditions are covered in detail in Alert Conditions & Indicator Comparisons.
• Trigger frequency — how often a still-true condition may notify you (once, once per bar, once per bar close, once per minute, or every time).
• Expiration — when the alert should stop on its own, or open-ended.
• Message — an optional note included with the notification.
• Notifications — which channels deliver the alert: in-app toast, browser notification, sound, and/or a webhook.

How alerts run

Alerts evaluate against the same live price stream the chart uses, so they respect your data provider and realtime/delayed feed (see Realtime vs Delayed Data). An alert keeps watching as long as it is active and enabled, even while the sidebar is closed — you do not need to keep the panel open.

Where alerts are stored

Alerts run entirely in your browser. There is no server involved — evaluation, storage, and notifications all happen locally on your device.

Alerts, their settings, and the triggered log are saved in your browser's local storage on a single device. They persist across sessions, are not synced to a server or across devices, and are removed if you clear site data. You can move alerts between browsers with export/import — see Notifications, Triggered Log & Managing Alerts.

Because alerting is local, the browser tab must be open for alerts to evaluate and fire. If you close the tab or the browser, alerts will not trigger until you reopen the app.

Server-side alerting — where alerts evaluate in the background without requiring an open browser tab and sync across devices — is planned for a future release once a built-in user authentication system is in place.

Next steps

Start by creating your first alert.

Next: Creating & Editing Alerts