Overview of Technical Alerts
Overview
Technical Alerts continually search our entire database of ticker symbols, looking for those that meet specific technical criteria. The criteria can be anything from a simple price alert (e.g. the Dow crossing above 20,000) to a complex search involving multiple technical indicators (e.g. Canadian stocks that are in an uptrend, show oversold CCI values and have just experienced a MACD crossover).
When the number of ticker symbols that meet those criteria change in a specified way, interested parties are alerted to the change. This is a great way to discover securities worth investing in, at the time they are worth investing in. Essentially, alerts are technical scans that are automatically run for you by StockCharts.
We offer two different kinds of alerts:
Predefined Alerts are created by StockCharts for everyone to use, and generally check for broad market criteria.
Custom Alerts are designed by you, for you, and can be as simple or complex as you like.
Predefined Technical Alerts
StockCharts.com automatically runs a large number of important Predefined Technical Alerts during the trading day. When these predefined alerts are triggered, we post a message about them on our Twitter feed, as well as add them to our Predefined Technical Alerts Notification page.
Predefined Technical Alerts are available for everyone to see. You do not need to be a member to see those results. As the name implies, however, you cannot change or create new predefined alerts.
Learn More. Predefined Technical Alerts
Custom Technical Alerts
Custom Technical Alerts, designed by you, search our database using your exact technical criteria. Unlike with predefined alerts, you have control over what criteria are used and how you are notified when symbols meet the criteria in your custom alerts.
StockCharts members can create and schedule their own Custom Technical Alerts using whatever technical criteria they want.
To create, edit and schedule a Custom Technical Alert, you need to use the Technical Alert Workbench, on which you can create two different types of custom alerts:
For simple Price Alerts (notifying you when a specific symbol crosses above or below a specific price), you can use the new Price Alert Builder. This simplified form makes it quick and easy to create price alerts.
For more complex Advanced Alerts (using multiple indicators or criteria other than simple price crossovers), you can use the traditional Advanced Alert Builder. This section of the Technical Alert Workbench is very similar to the Advanced Scan Workbench, making it easy to convert a working Advanced Scan into an Advanced Alert.
To access the Technical Alert Workbench from Your Dashboard, click the “Technical Alert Workbench” link in the Member Tools section or, alternatively, click the “New Alert” button in the Your Alerts section. Once on the workbench, use the “Alert Type” buttons at the top left to choose whether you would like to create a Price Alert or an Advanced Alert.
Note: Basic users can create and schedule just 1 Advanced Alert and 2 Price Alerts, while Extra members can have up to 100 Advanced and 200 Price Alerts, and Pro members can have up to 250 Advanced and 500 Price Alerts on their account.
Learn More: Technical Alert Workbench
Alert Processing
Alerts are processed by taking all active alerts for all users, running the associated scans and determining how many of those alerts have triggered (that is, how many alerts had the specified number of securities meet the designated criteria). Users whose alerts have been triggered are notified. This process repeats continuously throughout market hours, with alert engine data that is updated every 3-5 minutes.
Since alerts are based on daily data, users will only be notified once per day that a particular alert has triggered. For example, if you have an alert that looks for Intel to cross above $22 and the stock crosses above and below $22 several times during the day, you will only be contacted the first time the price crosses above $22.
Since all user alerts are processed dozens of times per day, significant performance gains can be made by making the underlying scans run faster. You can improve the performance of your Advanced Alerts by learning the best way to put scan expressions together. For more information on how to write scans and alerts that will run faster, see the Scan Speed topic in our Troubleshooting Scans documentation. As the speed of all scans improves, the lag time for alert notification decreases for everyone.
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