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Buy, sell and other side words

The side field decides one thing: whether your alert is a buy, a sell or neither. Your side text is never rewritten.

TickerShare reads your side in three steps, in this order. Capital letters, spaces, dashes and underscores do not matter, and joined-up words like TakeProfit or CLOSELONG are read as two words.

  1. It mentions an exit word: exit, close, flat, cover, take profit, stop loss, stop hit, stopped, or TP or SL (like TP1 or SL2). Only whole words count, so Long Recovery is still a buy. It posts as a text message, never a card. So Exit Long, Long TP1 and buy to cover can never become a BUY card.
  2. It mentions sell or short: a red SELL card. For example sell, short, STRONG SELL, Short Entry.
  3. It mentions buy or long: a green BUY card. For example buy, long, Buy Signal, Long Entry.

Anything else, like hold or bullish, posts as a text message too. So does a buy that mentions an exit word, like Buy at close: when in doubt TickerShare posts text rather than risk the wrong colour. Buy Stop is still a buy, because stop on its own is not an exit word. Keep prices out of the side and put them in price, tp1 and sl instead: a side like BUY TP1 1.10 mentions TP, so it posts as text.

Any other word: a text message with your word as sent

An exit, a close, a take profit or any word of your own posts as a text message. It shows your side word as your alert sent it (a very long side is shortened to 40 characters), with every value the alert carries:

⚪ AAPL · Exit Long · 1h
📍 Price: 190.20

It never becomes a card, because a card is drawn as a buy or a sell and the wrong colour would tell your subscribers the opposite of what you meant. In your delivery log the row shows Text (not buy or sell). It is not an error.

An alert with no side at all posts the same way, without a side word.

With a TradingView strategy

  • "side": "{{strategy.market_position}}" sends long after a buy, short after a sell and flat once the position is closed. Your channel gets a BUY card, a SELL card and a text message that says flat.
  • "side": "{{strategy.order.action}}" only ever sends buy or sell. In a long-only strategy the exit order is a sell, so the exit would post as a SELL card. Use {{strategy.market_position}} if your strategy exits.
  • Strategy placeholders only fill in on alerts made on a strategy. On an indicator alert, type a fixed word.
  • Partial exits: after a partial take profit the position is still long, so {{strategy.market_position}} still says long and would post a BUY card. For partial exits, give the exit order an id like TP1 and send "side": "{{strategy.order.id}}", or make a separate alert with a fixed word like "side": "Exit".

With an indicator

An indicator alert sends the fixed word you type. Make one alert per condition, for example "side": "buy", "side": "sell" and "side": "Exit".

In your own message template

If you write a custom message template, {{side}} prints exactly what your alert sent.