This post introduces a new feature to the site – Price Alerts. This isn’t your basic simple price alert like your broker offers. Yes, you can enter a share price target as an alert, but you can also be alerted to price crossing above or below a moving average or a moving average crossing above or below another moving average. Also, if you prefer price retracements, you can set an x% retracement (up or down) from a point in time, and you will get an emailed alert when the retracement happens.
Several of you have requested something like this over the past few years, and we’ve been putting it off. Finally, we took your requests and built something around them. Alerts are built on top of Portfolios so you can easily create Alerts for one or more of your existing Portfolios. Or, if you create a special Portfolio for your Alerts, you still have all the functionality of standard Portfolios such as performance reports and screening.
There is a link to the Alerts Page under the My Pages tab on the navigation bar. From there you can choose to Create New Alerts or Manage Existing Alerts. Whether you are creating new Alerts based on an existing or new Portfolio, you start by selecting ‘Create New Alerts’.
From there you will be queried for symbols if creating a new portfolio or taken straight to the alert definition page if using an existing portfolio. On the alerts definition page you can set alerts for the entire portfolio and/or for each symbol individually. Noting the image above, just click the pencil to edit an alert rule, the red ‘X’ to delete a rule, and the green ‘+’ to add another rule for a symbol. There is a maximum of 2 portfolio level rules and four symbol level rules.
Alerts are processed each evening after the closing prices are booked, and then emails are sent. An email will be sent summarizing the alerts for each portfolio, but only when an alert is triggered that day. If a portfolio has no alerts triggered that day, no email will be sent.
I should point out that this system is still being fine tuned and probably has some bugs. If you notice something not working, please let us know by replying to this post. Some common questions have been answered on the FAQ’s Page, but I’m sure there will be more.
If page flow or messages can be simplified, please don’t hesitate to point it out.
Be ALERT-ed!
Great addition to the site. I like the number of different alerts available,
alerts define do not save. why?
I just tried creating Alerts for a group of symbols and everything worked OK.
On the page where you define the actual alerts, the page after you input the symbols, there is an Update button at the bottom of the page that you must click to save the Alerts. You will then get a page that say something like “Congratulations – your alerts have been saved.” At that point you are done and can go to another page, OR you can make further changes and click Update at the bottom of that page.
My guess is that you might not have clicked the Update button, but that is only a guess.
Hugh
If I select a favorite screen from the existing options, how do I receive updates about changes in the portfolio of that screen? Can this be done through alerts or do I just have to log into the account and check each day?