Send a TradingView alert to a Capital.com account
Capital.com is the one broker here you bring your own API key to, and it has two surprises that both come down to names. The password it asks for is not your account password, and the instrument it trades is not the ticker on your chart — XAUUSD there is GOLD. Neither is difficult once you know; both are confusing for an afternoon if you do not.
Checked against Tradeus on 15 October 2026.
Before you start
- A TradingView account with 2-factor authentication enabled.
- A Capital.com API key, made under Settings → API integrations. Demo and live are separate hosts and a key made on one does not work on the other, so make the key in the environment you intend to trade.
- The custom password you set when you created that key — not your Capital.com account password. It is not shown again.
- A Tradeus plan that includes the TradingView webhook — Algo or Unlimited.
The numbers
- Time TradingView waits for the receiver
- 3 seconds, then the request is cancelled
- Ports it will post to
- 80 and 443 only
- IPv6
- Not supported for webhooks
- Account requirement
- 2-factor authentication must be enabled
- What Capital.com asks for
- API key, login e-mail, the key's own password, demo or live
- That password
- The one you invent when creating the key — not the account password
- Symbols
- Instrument names, not chart tickers — XAUUSD is GOLD
- Strategy market
- cfd
Step by step
What to do, in order.
- 1
Make an API key, and keep the password you invent for it
Capital.com asks for three things: the API key, your login e-mail, and a password — and that third field is the one people get wrong. It is a custom password you choose while creating the key, not the one you sign in with. It is shown once. Pick demo or live before you start, because the two live on separate hosts and a key issued on one is refused by the other.
- 2
Create the strategy as a CFD strategy
A strategy declares the market it trades, and only accounts in that market may follow it. Capital.com accounts are CFD accounts, so the strategy has to be a cfd strategy. A futures strategy will refuse them — correct behaviour that reads like a bug the first time you meet it.
- 3
Check what your ticker is called over there
Capital.com does not use chart tickers; it uses its own instrument names. XAUUSD on your chart is GOLD on the account, and a signal naming a symbol the broker does not recognise is refused rather than guessed at. Fire one test alert and read the event log — it names what the symbol became, so you find this out in a second rather than in a position.
- 4
Paste the URL and the ready-made message into a TradingView alert
Open the alert dialog on your chart, put the webhook URL in the Notifications tab's Webhook URL field, and paste the strategy's own alert message into the message box. Use the message Tradeus shows on the strategy rather than an example from anywhere else: it already has your passphrase filled in and it already sends the two fields that make a repeated alert harmless.
- 5
Subscribe an account to the strategy
Until an account follows the strategy, signals are recorded and nothing trades. This is the step people miss, and it is the single most common reason a first alert arrives, shows green in the event log, and moves no money. A strategy with no subscribers is a working endpoint with nowhere to send anything.
- 6
Set the size on that subscription
Size belongs to the subscription — one account following one strategy — not to the strategy. That is what lets one signal put a single contract on an evaluation and four on a funded account. Choose the alert's own quantity times a factor, a fixed number of contracts, a dollar amount of risk per trade, or a percentage of the balance.
- 7
Arm a daily loss limit before the first live signal
A daily loss limit is the cheapest insurance in the product, and the right moment to set it is before anything has traded rather than after something has. It sits on the account, so it holds whether the order came from this strategy, another one, or the copier. It is checked about every five seconds rather than before each order, so a fast market can carry the loss past it before the account is locked and its positions are closed.
- 8
Fire one alert manually and read the event log
Every signal is recorded, including the refused ones, and each refusal names its own reason — invalid passphrase, no subscription, outside the trading window, rounds to 0 contracts. Send one deliberate test alert and read what the log says about it. If the signal is not in the log at all it never arrived, which is a TradingView-side problem rather than anything to change here.
What goes wrong
Named after the message you will see.
Each of these is a line from the event log or from TradingView, written as it appears — because that is the string you will paste into a search box at the moment you need this page.
The API key password is not your account password
Capital.com's key carries its own password, invented by you at the moment the key was created and never displayed again. If the connection is refused and the key is certainly right, this is almost always why. Make a new key rather than guessing — the old one stops working and nothing else breaks.
A demo key on the live host, or the other way round
Demo and live are separate hosts at Capital.com. A key made in demo is not a weaker live key, it is simply unknown to the live host. A connection that fails immediately with correct-looking credentials is usually this.
The symbol is not the symbol
The chart says XAUUSD, the account says GOLD. The signal is refused rather than guessed at, which is the behaviour you want, and the event log prints what the name resolved to. Check there before changing anything about the alert.
Accepted is not filled
Capital.com answers an order with a reference, and their own documentation says that reference does not mean the position was opened. Tradeus waits for the confirmation before it reports a fill, so an order can sit as accepted for a moment and then be rejected by the broker. The event log shows both stages; the position panel shows only what is actually open.
“no subscription” — the alert arrived and nothing traded
The strategy received the signal and no account was following it. Open the strategy, add the account, and re-send. This accounts for more first-run confusion than every other cause put together, because the webhook itself answers perfectly well.
“invalid passphrase” after everything worked yesterday
Somebody pressed New passphrase. The old one stops working immediately and the alert in TradingView still carries it. Copy the current message off the strategy into the alert again.
“rounds to 0 contracts”
Dollar-risk sizing divided your risk budget by the stop distance and got less than one contract, and less than one contract is no trade. A wide stop with a small budget does this every time. It appears in the event log as a rejection rather than as a fill that went missing.
The webhook fires but TradingView reports a failure
Check the three things TradingView itself limits: the receiver has three seconds to answer, only ports 80 and 443 are accepted, and IPv6 is not supported. A hosted endpoint clears all three by construction; a bridge running on your own machine has to clear them itself, on your home connection, while you are asleep.
Questions
Asked before buying, answered either way.
Why does it want a second password?
Capital.com's API keys each carry their own password, which you choose while creating the key. It is shown once and is not your account password. If you no longer have it, make a new key — the old one stops working and nothing else is affected.
Can I try this on Capital.com's demo side first?
Yes, and it is the sensible way in. Make the key on their demo host and connect it as demo. Everything on this page behaves the same way there, and a malformed alert costs nothing but the lesson.
My alert names XAUUSD and nothing happened. Why?
Capital.com calls that instrument GOLD. A symbol the broker does not recognise is refused rather than guessed at, and the event log prints what the name resolved to — read that line before changing the alert.
In the handbook
The reference pages behind the steps above — one thing each, in full.
- Connecting Capital.comA key you make yourself, with a password that is not your account's.
- Which brokers workSix you can connect today, what each one asks for, and which of them copy a trade you place by hand.
- Symbol names per accountOne signal, each account's own name for the instrument.
- When a signal does not tradeRead the event log first — it names the reason.
Sources
Every claim above about somebody else's product, linked to the page it was read from. If one of them no longer says what this page says, this page is wrong and we want to know: tell us.
Checked against the live product on 15 October 2026. Broker screens and TradingView's own limits change; a step that no longer matches what you see is a step we need to fix.
Next
The neighbouring jobs.
Weighing this against another tool? All 7 compared, every row linked to the page it was read from.
The only step this page cannot do.
Everything above is mechanical and takes about ten minutes. Whether it behaves the way you expect on your own accounts is the part nobody can write down for you.