Why do signals flash or disappear?

We'll start with the explanation of what you're seeing, and what is actually happening. Afterwards, we'll go into what we recommend today to avoid it, why we utilize this method, and touch on a future option (NOW AVAILABLE) we are releasing to avoid the confusion altogether.

A real-time algorithm is calculating data on every tick of a real-time bar. This means that while that bar is open it's still accepting data. When a threshold is met during that open bar, a suggested signal can appear. If the movement and predictive calculations stay above that threshold all the way until close, you're in the perfect scenario. However, there are times when that threshold is being crossed over and below causing "flashing". That's when the suggested signal is no longer holding true during the real-time processing. So while it looks like someone is pushing buttons to make things look good, that's not the case. It's simply the side effect of running the algorithm all the way up to the real-time tick data closing, instead of looking back at closed data.

I'll explain how to currently avoid this, and then I'll go into why we do it this way. So, to avoid this we tells users to utilize our recommendation of setting alerts to "on bar close". Doing this insures that you're being alerted when a signal was in place at the close of the bar and a new bar is starting to form. This means that signal was locked in and you avoided the risk of getting in early mid candle when a reversal could still happen.

So why do we do it this way? The reason for that is because we have advanced traders that love this feature as they can leverage other means of confirmation that allows them to jump in early on the first appearance of a signal. Taking it away would upset half of our community when there is already a setup procedure in place to avoid it by using "on bar close". So we keep that balance to try and please as many of our members as possible.

With that said, to further avoid confusion for new users that might not reach the documentation explaining the alert configurations, we are adding a settings option in the near future to disable the ability of "flashing" altogether. This will mean the real-time processing is held back to get you in at the open of a following bar. Yes, it could mean late or appear as a bar late on the chart, but if you were not the advanced type to jump in mid bar with the default configuration you would be reacting based off a "on bar close" alert... Which would put you in at the open of the next bar anyways based on the logistics of receiving and reacting to those alerts.

UPDATE: Since Vision v1.4.0 we've included a settings option to turn off real-time processing. This will help avoid flashing signals during the candle that's still processing data. It's a personal preference, experiment and see which works best for your trading plan.