TradingView Alerts Not Placing Trades? 9 Causes and Fixes

Short answer: work through the causes in the order below — they are sorted by how often they are the real problem. If the alert never reaches your bridge at all, it is a TradingView-side issue (plan, URL field, alert expiry). If it arrives but no order appears, it is an MT5-side issue (AutoTrading, the EA, WebRequest permission, symbol naming).

First: find out where it stops

Before changing anything, work out which half of the chain is failing. Open your bridge's activity log and look:

What the log shows	Where the problem is	Go to
Nothing at all — no entry for the alert	TradingView side	Causes 1–3
The alert arrived but was rejected	The alert's content	Causes 4–5
Arrived and queued, but never executed	MT5 side	Causes 6–8
Executed, but the wrong trade	Configuration	Cause 9

This single check saves most of the time people spend on this problem. A setup that has never once reached the log has a completely different fault from one that reaches it and fails.

1. Your TradingView plan has no webhooks

Webhook notifications are a paid feature. On the free plan the alert fires, shows on your screen, and sends nothing outward. There is no workaround and no tool can add it.

Check: open the alert, go to Notifications. If "Webhook URL" is greyed out or absent, this is your answer.

2. The URL is in the wrong field

The webhook address goes in the Webhook URL box under Notifications. The Message box is for the alert body — the JSON. Pasting the URL into the message means TradingView sends the text of a URL to nowhere.

3. The alert expired or was deleted

TradingView alerts do not necessarily live forever — they can stop after a period, and they stop when the chart's indicator is removed. An alert that worked last month and silently stopped is often simply inactive.

Check: the Alerts panel. An inactive alert is greyed out; restart it.

4. The alert body cannot be read

If your bridge shows the alert as rejected, it arrived and could not be understood. Common reasons:

• Broken JSON — a missing brace or quote, usually from hand-editing.
• An unresolved placeholder. If you see a literal {{ticker}} in the received text, that placeholder does not exist on that alert type. TradingView leaves unknown placeholders as-is rather than erroring.
• A missing mandatory field — no position size, or a pending order with no entry price.

A well-built bridge names the exact field in its rejection message. If yours only says "invalid", that is worth knowing about your tool.

5. The symbol does not exist at your broker

This one produces the strangest symptom: it works on some symbols and not others.

Brokers add suffixes. Gold might be XAUUSD, XAUUSD+, XAUUSD.m, XAUUSDm or XAUUSD.raw depending on the account type. Your alert sends whatever TradingView calls it, which is usually the bare name.

Worse, some brokers keep an unquoted legacy entry with the bare name. The executor finds a symbol that exists, but it has no live price — so the order fails with a confusing message about prices rather than symbols.

Fix: set the exact broker symbol in your webhook settings. Copy it from MT5's Market Watch, including any suffix, exactly as written.

6. AutoTrading is off

The single most common MT5-side cause. The AutoTrading button in the toolbar must be green. If it is red, every EA on every chart is disabled and nothing will trade.

Also check the chart itself: the EA's face in the top-right corner should be smiling. A sad face means trading is disabled for that specific EA.

7. WebRequest is not allowed — error 4014

If your executor collects alerts over the internet, MetaTrader blocks it until you say otherwise. Go to Tools → Options → Expert Advisors, tick Allow WebRequest for listed URL, and add the exact API address.

Common mistake	Correct
Adding the website instead of the API address	Use the address the tool tells you to
Missing https://	Include the scheme
Trailing slash	Leave it off
Added while the EA was running	Remove and re-attach the EA after

The Experts tab will show error 4014 when this is the problem.

8. The terminal is not running when the alert fires

If the executor lives inside MT5, the terminal must be open and connected at the moment the alert arrives. A sleeping laptop, a logged-out Windows session or a disconnected broker connection all produce exactly the same symptom: the alert is logged as received, and nothing happens.

This is the fundamental trade-off of the local model, and the reason most people who rely on it run a VPS.

9. It traded, but not what you expected

The order appeared, but it is wrong. Usually one of these:

Symptom	Cause
Only one take-profit set, others missing	The alert format lists targets in a way the parser only partly reads. Check the parsed line in the log against what you sent.
Entered at market when you wanted a limit	The order type is not set, or the tool is market-only
Two positions from one signal	Duplicate delivery, or a repainting Once Per Bar alert
Position closed unexpectedly	An opposite signal with close-and-reverse configured — check the log for a flip
Lot size far off	Risk-percentage sizing with a stop distance different from what you assumed
Stop rejected by the broker	Placed closer than the broker's minimum distance

How to diagnose it from scratch in five minutes

1. Put the webhook in dry run, so nothing can trade while you debug.
2. Fire one alert manually from TradingView.
3. Look at the log. No entry at all means causes 1–3. An entry means TradingView is fine and the problem is below it.
4. Read the parsed line. If it is wrong, it is the alert body or the webhook settings, not MT5.
5. If parsing is right, check the MT5 Experts tab for the reason it did not execute.

Working top-down like this takes a few minutes. Changing settings at random can take an afternoon.

Related

If you are setting this up for the first time, start with how to connect TradingView alerts to MT5. If you are choosing between tools, the comparison framework lists the questions worth asking before you pay for one.