There are two different ways to get price alerts in your MetaTrader Forex trading platform. The first one is to use the
Both MT4 and MT5 support an alert system that allows setting the price alerts directly from within the platform. The MT4 version is slightly inferior due to lack of the Volume alerts and the alerts based on the Last price (such alerts don't differentiate between Bid and Ask prices). All screenshots in this tutorial will be from MetaTrader 5 interface — the differences with MetaTrader 4 are minimal and aren't related to the way the alerts are placed.
1. Switch to the Alerts tab of the Toolbox panel of the platform (called Terminal in MT4). If you have no current alerts set up, the tab will be empty.
2.
3. The Alert Editor will pop up.
4. The Enable checkbox can be unchecked to disable the alert temporarily without deleting it.
5. Choose Action to be triggered by the alert. There are four choices available: Sound (default) — will play a sound file of your choice, File — will execute a program of your choice, Mail — will send an
6. If you want your alert to expire after specific day or time, you can enable the Expiration checkbox and choose the appropriate date and time:
7. Now you can choose the Symbol for the alert, Condition and Value. There are nine conditions available: Bid >, Bid, Ask < — are
8. Choose the source. For the Sound alert, it is a file containing the sound (can be WAV, MP3, or WMA). For the File alert, it is the executable file to be launched. For the Mail alert, a special
9. Set the Timeout for your alert — the period of time to wait before alert action iterations will be performed. For example, if you set it to 10 seconds, you will hear the alert sound every 10 seconds.
10. Set the Maximum iterations number — this value determines how many times the alert action will be performed. For example, if you set it to 3, you will hear the alert sound only 3 times.
11. You can test the alert before saving it. Clicking the Test button will trigger your chosen alert action.
12. To save your alert, just click the OK button.
13. The created alert will be displayed in the Alerts tab. Untriggered alerts are displayed in normal font (the first and the fourth ones in the list on the image); triggered alerts are displayed in bold (the second and the third ones in the example list). A triggered alert with a crossed bell icon (the second one in the list) has reached the limit of its iterations and will no longer work. A triggered alert with a swinging bell icon (the third one in the list) has one or more iterations left and will continue to work.
Some additional tips for using the price alerts in MetaTrader platform:
AlertEditor
under the [Alert]
section there.A valid question for many traders is how to copy several alerts from one platform to the other without setting up them manually?
Unfortunately, alerts in MT4 and MT5 are platform-based and don't save into profiles. This means that there is no straightforward feature to transfer alerts from one PC (platform) to another.
However, you can move alerts by moving the platform’s .dat files:
If you are looking to add alerts to a MetaTrader indicator rather than to use a generic price alert system of the platform, please read our tutorial on adding alerts to indicators.
If you don't understand a part of this tutorial and still have some questions about using the price alerts in MetaTrader platform, feel free to leave ask your questions via our Forex forum.
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