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A price alert watches one market outcome and fires when it trades through a threshold you set. Alerts are a Chrome extension feature — they are created, listed and delivered there, and nowhere else.
Neither the Telegram bot nor the web terminal has an alerts screen. If you want price alerts, you need the extension.

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Creating one

Two places do it:
  • On a Polymarket page — the Ballista panel has an alert form for the outcome you are looking at. Pick above or below, type a threshold, and it is created against that market.
  • From the notifications panel — the bell in the extension popup opens a sheet that lists your alerts and lets you add one.
An alert is a condition and a number: Setting above 0.62 fires when the outcome trades over 62¢. Setting below 0.62 fires when it trades under.

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How it fires

Ballista watches Polymarket’s trade feed continuously on its own servers, so an alert works whether or not your browser is open. When the price crosses your threshold, the alert triggers once and is done — it does not re-arm and it does not fire again on the next tick. If you want to be told about the same level again, create it again.
Alerts fire on trades, not on quotes. If nobody trades the outcome, an alert does not fire even though the quoted price has moved past your threshold. On an illiquid market this can mean a long wait, or no alert at all.
The extension checks every 30 seconds while your browser is running and raises a Chrome desktop notification for anything new, naming the market by its Polymarket slug along with the direction and the threshold in cents. Each trigger is announced once. The extension remembers what it has already shown you, so a notification you did not click is not repeated on the next check and does not keep reappearing until you read it. A burst of triggers costs one desktop notification rather than one per check for as long as the backlog lasts.
Nothing is lost when several arrive at once. The desktop notification is a nudge, not the record — the bell in the extension popup shows everything you have not read, however many that is.
The notification arrives when your browser next checks, not at the instant the price crossed. The trigger itself is recorded on the server the moment it happens, so nothing is lost if your machine was asleep — you get it when you come back.

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Notifications

A triggered alert becomes a notification. The bell in the extension popup shows the ones you have not read yet, and marking one read is what clears it. The list is per account, so it is the same wherever you have the extension signed in. Notifications cannot be deleted, only marked read. Alerts and notifications are two states of the same thing: an alert is one waiting for its price, a notification is one that already fired. Not everything in the feed is a price alert. The copy-trading engine writes a copy trade stopped notice here when a copy trade hits its balance limit and is switched off holding a position it could not sell — it carries a written message naming that position instead of a direction and a threshold, and it means something of yours is still open in the market. When one of these is waiting alongside price alerts, it is the one raised as the desktop notification. See Extension alerts.

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Managing your alerts

The notifications sheet lists your active alerts alongside your notifications, each with a delete button. Deleting an alert that has not fired stops it for good. Deleting is for alerts only — anything already in the notification feed, price alert or copy-trade notice, is cleared by reading it.

Extension alerts

The screens themselves, step by step.

Presets

Act on an alert in one click.