Crypto & Futures
Going long means buying in the expectation that the price will rise; going short means selling something you do not own, or opening a sell-side derivative position, in the expectation that the price will fall so you can close lower; on perpetual futures and in forex both directions are available with equal ease.
Direction is the first thing a signal has to convey and the first thing a parser can get wrong. Channels use many words for it: LONG, BUY, SHORT, SELL, arrows, emoji, "bullish", "bearish". Some formats reverse the meaning for a close ("sell" on an open long means close, not open a short), and TradingView strategies send "sell" both for exits and for new shorts, so the platform has to look at the current position, not just the word. A reversed direction is the most expensive parsing error there is: the stop and target are then on the wrong side too.
AlgoVesta's parser recognises the common direction markers for crypto and forex channels and normalises them to long or short. For TradingView, the platform uses the strategy's position state fields where present, so a "flat" exit closes the open position instead of opening the opposite one, and the same logic runs in paper mode. On spot bots a short signal is blocked with a visible reason because spot cannot short. An optional reverse setting lets you deliberately trade the opposite direction of a source, with the stop and target mirrored around the entry; on TradingView strategies it is shown as a persistent warning so it is never on by accident. Limits on open positions and on positions in the same direction are enforced per bot. Every executed trade records the direction alongside the fill, and the dashboard shows longs and shorts with their own labels. See TradingView bot and crypto automation.
A TradingView strategy on ETHUSDT sends "buy" and opens a long. Later it sends "sell" with market position "flat". AlgoVesta closes the long rather than opening a short. A different alert with market position "short" opens a new short after closing. On a Telegram channel, the message "🔴 ETHUSDT SELL 3,100" is read as a short with the stop above and the target below.