Alert! Alert!

By -

I am pleased to announce the latest addition to Slope’s product family.

alert

At the outset, I want to say three important things about SlopeAlerts:

  1. This product is absolutely not finished. This is the Alpha version of the product, and even that is probably a kind descriptor. Using it won’t cause your computer to burst into flames, but you should absolutely regard your experimentation with this as just that: an experiment. I’m not even going to list the page in a menu yet!
  2. This is intended as a premium product, but I’m letting everyone use it right now. How come? Because I want as much feedback as possible.
  3. Your alerts are temporary. Once we’re done with testing, we intend to wipe clean all the alerts that have been set up. So feel free to set up whatever goofy alerts you like. They’ll all go away before we deploy this for real, which shouldn’t be too long.

More than anything else, I’m after your feedback, so please use the feedback form to give me bug reports, ideas, and suggestions. Please don’t just leave it in comments. I’m depending on to give me your input.

So, with all that fanfare, I present to you this link to the first version of SlopeAlerts. I have disabled this as we are reworking the product.

The purpose of this product is straightforward: it provides you a means by which you can establish however many rules you like, based on any of the conditions available, to get real time (well, close to real time) alerts during the trading day about “events” that happen to the symbols you specify.

createmy

Now let me stop right here and now and nip a suggestion in the bud: “Couldn’t I apply a rule to an entire watchlist?” Nope. Sorry. That isn’t the way it’s designed. I get what you’re saying, but not yet.

Thus, the first step is to enter a symbol:

step symbol

After you click the Next Step button comes the most important part, which is the conditions.

You can set up as many conditions as you like, but obviously you have to establish at least one. This is very much like SlopeRules: you choose a value from the dropdown, a condition, and then another value.

This lets you establish alerts based on, for example, a stock going above or below a certain price, or a 50-day moving average crossing above or below a 200-day moving average, or a stock hitting a new 52-week high or low.

You can also assert whether or not an “alert” is based on all the conditions being met, or merely any of them.

step cond

There’s an important feature in that right column, and I’m quite proud of how we’ve designed this. You can enter either a value (like 25, or 33, or 3.73, or whatever you like) or a data point (such as a High price or Low price or 200-Day Moving Average, etc.) This gives you tremendous flexibility in how you design your conditions and express your requirements.

To “toggle” between the ability to enter values and the ability to choose from the dropdown, you just click the link shown, as illustrated here:

Dropdown

We once again click Next Step and tell the system how we want to be notified, and how frequently the system should examine the data feed for the alert.

We can enter an email address……..

step email

…..or even get a text on our phone……….

step sms

Lastly, give your alert a name. Best to avoid a name like “Alert #1”; instead, give it a name that represents what it does in some way.

step

You may ask: how is this different from SlopeRules? The main difference is immediacy.

SlopeRules crunches the numbers after the market is closed and sends you an end-of-day report with any triggers. SlopeAlerts, however, is monitoring the market in real time through the trading day, and it alerts you via email or text as to symbol-specific events which are triggered.

At the risk of belittling this fine new product, I say once again this is simply the “version 0.1” of it, and I’m sure to receive plenty of suggestions. I look forward to reading them, and I thank you.