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Every numeric signal — a price level, an indicator reading, today’s percentage move — ends with an operator. The operator decides whether you hear about a level once or over and over. Choosing the wrong one is the most common reason a new automation floods you, so it is worth two minutes now.
A price line crossing a threshold, showing one firing point for a crossing operator and many firing points for a continuous operator

Same price path, same level, two operators. One alert against dozens.

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The five choices

The dropdown labels tell you which is which. The words in brackets are on screen, not something we added here. Not all five show up every time. Pick a candlestick pattern — a shape drawn by one or more bars on a chart, such as a hammer or an engulfing bar — and the dropdown collapses to Equals (exact), because a pattern is either detected on the latest bar or it isn’t. For everything else, Equals is hidden and you get the other four. The Volume signal has no operator at all: the check is always “above”.

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In plain English

A crossover is a moment, not a state. It is the instant a value passes through a level. Crosses Below 30 describes the single check where the reading went from 30-point-something to 29-point-something. One event, one alert. Goes Below 30 describes a situation, and a situation can last for days. Active automations are re-checked every 60 seconds. If a reading sits under your level all afternoon, a continuous operator is true on every one of those checks — that is roughly 390 chances to message you between the opening bell and the close.

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Which one you want

Almost always a crossing operator. Reach for Crosses Above or Crosses Below unless you specifically want to be told, repeatedly, that a condition is still holding. Continuous operators earn their place in two situations:
  • As a filter, not the headline. RSI Crosses Below 30 AND price Goes Below the 200-day average: the crossing is the event, the continuous check confirms the backdrop. RSI, the Relative Strength Index, is a 0 to 100 score for how hard a stock has been pushed one way lately.
  • On a slow timeframe. A daily reading is evaluated once a day at the close, so Goes Below on a daily indicator can fire at most once per trading day.
If you use a continuous operator anywhere, set a cooldown to match — the minimum quiet period after a trigger, set on the Action node. The default is one hour.
A cooldown mutes repeats; it does not fix a badly chosen operator. If you set a 1-hour cooldown on Goes Below, you have turned eighty alerts a day into seven, and every one of them is still telling you the same thing. Change the operator first.

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The first check after you save

A crossing operator needs a previous reading to compare against, and there isn’t one on the very first check after you save. On that check only, a crossing operator behaves like the plain above/below comparison. After that it works as described. So if the value is already past your level when you save, a crossing operator fires on that first check rather than waiting for a fresh crossing. Set Crosses Below 30 on a symbol already sitting at 24 and you get an alert within the minute. After that first check it behaves as described — it waits for the reading to come back above 30 and go through again.

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Next

Signal types

All nine, and the parameters each one takes.

Runs and history

Work out why a signal did or didn’t fire.