Why Your MT5 Alerts Only Work If Your PC Is On—and the One Fix No One Talks About

You’re not at your desk. The market makes a move you’ve been waiting for all day. Your MT5 alert is supposed to notify you—but your phone stays silent.

Sound familiar?

Here’s the hard truth about MT5 alerts: most traders set them up wrong. Not because they don’t follow the steps, but because they don’t understand the one critical limitation that catches everyone off guard.

How MT5 Alerts Actually Work

When you set a price alert in MT5—whether by right-clicking on a chart and selecting Trading > Alert, or through the Toolbox window’s Alerts tab—what you’re actually doing is telling your desktop terminal to monitor price action . The alert lives on your PC, not in the cloud, not on your phone.

The four available actions—Sound, File, Mail, and Notification—all depend on the same condition: your MT5 desktop application must remain running and connected to the broker’s server .

This is where the confusion starts.

The MetaQuotes ID Trap

To receive push notifications on your phone, you need to pair your desktop MT5 with your mobile app using a MetaQuotes ID . You find this ID in the mobile app settings (Settings > Messages or Settings > Chat and Messages), then paste it into Tools > Options > Notifications on your desktop .

But here’s what most tutorials don’t emphasize: even after you’ve entered the ID and successfully received a test notification, your phone will only get alerts if your PC is on and MT5 is running . Close your laptop, put it to sleep, or shut down MT5—and your alerts stop. No notification. No missed move warning. Nothing.

One forum user put it bluntly: “Remember that when you close the desktop terminal, you will stop getting your notifications” .

The Workaround No One Mentions

If you need 24/5 alert delivery, the standard recommendation is to run MT5 on a Virtual Private Server (VPS) . That’s a real solution—but it adds complexity and cost. For many traders, there’s a simpler alternative that solves a different part of the problem.

What If You Don’t Need to Leave MT5 Open?

Ask yourself this: why are you setting an alert in the first place?

For many traders, the real need isn’t a notification—it’s knowing where the market is without keeping MT5 in the foreground. You want to glance at prices, check your positions, and make a quick decision—all without the distraction of a full trading terminal on your screen.

This is the scenario where a lightweight companion tool makes more sense than relying on push notifications.

Camovia Tray turns your MT5 into a system tray tool. You don’t need to configure SMTP servers, copy MetaQuotes IDs, or worry about whether your PC is on to receive push notifications. Instead, you simply hover over the tray icon to see your favorite symbols’ live quotes—right from your system tray . Your data stays local, read directly from your terminal, never uploaded anywhere.

And if you’re managing open positions, the floating order window shows your trades clearly: symbol, direction, lots, open price, current profit/loss. One click to close a position—with a two-step confirmation to prevent accidents .

This isn’t a replacement for MT5 alerts. It’s a solution for the times when you don’t want an alert—you just want to see the market status without opening the terminal.

The Bottom Line

MT5 alerts work as designed—they’re desktop-based because that’s where the price data lives. Push notifications to your phone are a convenience feature, not a cloud service. If you need alerts when your PC is off, a VPS is the only reliable path.

But if you’re tired of keeping MT5 open just to glance at prices or check your positions, you might be solving the wrong problem. Sometimes the best alert is no alert—just faster, simpler access to what matters.