The argument for automating crypto alerts is stronger than the one for equities, and it comes down to a single fact: there is no close. A stock setup that triggers at 3am triggers when the market is shut, so you have not missed anything. A BTC setup that triggers at 3am has simply happened, and you were asleep.
Everything else about crypto — the volatility, the weekends, the fact that the interesting moves seem to happen while you are doing something else — makes manual watching worse, not better. This guide sets up rule-based BTC and ETH alerts that arrive in Telegram.
What is actually covered
BTC/USD and ETH/USD. Those two. Not a long tail of altcoins, and we would rather tell you that in the second paragraph than let you find out after signing up. If your strategy is about rotating through small-cap tokens, this is the wrong tool.
You select one market per strategy, so a crypto strategy is its own strategy rather than a setting inside an equity one. Forex is not supported at all.
What changes when there is no session
Three practical differences from setting up the same rule on a stock:
- Daily bars are arbitrary. A "day" on crypto is a 24-hour window chosen by convention, not a session with an open and a close. Daily indicators still work, but the boundary means less than it does on equities.
- No gaps. Stocks gap between yesterday's close and today's open, and many equity setups are really about that gap. Crypto trades through, so gap-based logic has nothing to bite on.
- Weekends are live. Your alert can fire on a Sunday. Worth deciding in advance whether that is something you want to be notified about.
Rules that translate well
The conditions that work on equities mostly work here, because they are relative to the instrument's own recent behaviour rather than to anything session-specific:
- Moving-average cross — price crossing above its 50-period average, or the 50 crossing the 200. A trend-following staple and the most common crypto rule people ask for.
- Breakout — a close above the highest high of the last N bars. Crypto ranges then expands violently, which is the pattern this is designed to catch.
- RSI oversold or overbought — RSI(14) below 30 or above 70. Fires more often here than on large-cap equities, so consider tightening it.
- Volume confirmation — attached to one of the above, never alone. See unusual volume alerts.
Setting it up
- Describe the rule. Type it the way you would say it — "alert me when Bitcoin crosses above its 50-day moving average" — and it builds the scanner blocks. If it cannot do part of what you asked, it says so rather than substituting something quietly.
- Set the market to BTC/USD or ETH/USD. One per strategy.
- Choose the timeframe. Hourly is the natural fit for crypto — it is where most of the movement you would actually trade lives. Daily works for slower trend following.
- Backtest it. Same bar-by-bar engine. Note that crypto history is shorter than the equity universe, so an indicator with a 200-period lookback has less data behind it — a thin sample is worth less than a thick one regardless of what number it produces.
- Connect Telegram and activate. It now watches continuously, including overnight and at weekends.
The honest limits
- Two assets only. BTC and ETH.
- No exchange connection. It never holds keys and never places an order. It watches and tells you.
- Not built for sub-minute moves. This is for setups you hold for hours or days. If your edge is measured in seconds, it is the wrong instrument.
- Shorter history for backtests than the equity universe has.
And the general one, which applies to any backtest you run here or anywhere: results assume fills at exactly your target or stop, with no slippage and no fees. On an asset that can move several percent in a minute, real slippage is not a rounding error.
Related reading
- How to get free stock alerts sent to Telegram — the Telegram connection itself.
- How to backtest a trading strategy without coding — before you switch any rule on.
- What win rate do you actually need? — the bar your rule has to clear, which does not change because the asset does.