Alerts

dhall6938

Just this morning, I ran some of my scans manually and they produced results but my alerts for the same scans have not sent a notification this morning. This is the first time that I noticed this happening. I have sent the question to SC but I don't think that they will respond. Have you guys got any idea what I may be doing wrong ?

dhall6938

I should mention that the alert does say that it is running.

markd

I think we looked at this before - we discussed checking the status of the alert I think as paused or active?

As I've said, I don't use alerts, but I think I recall that if the alert condition is already true when the alert is activated, you don't get an alert - the condition has to become true - i.e. the status has to change from false to true to trigger the alert. If it's already true it doesn't. That's different from a scan, where the condition has to be true at the moment to get picked up in the results.

But maybe someone who actually uses alerts can chime in.

dhall6938

Thanks. Yes, the last issue I had was not saving the alert after I had it set up correctly. I checked to make sure that all of the alert settings were correct and activated and saved so it's not that. I also checked manually to see if the scans would produce today as opposed to yesterday indicating the change you mention. Something else happened today that was odd. I was shut down for a few minutes because it, SC, thought that I had charts open on two separate devices. I didn't but it shut me down anyway. So far, I can't figure out why the alerts did not alert me today. May be some kind of glitch that they are working on and never hear about. Guess I'll see next week. Thanks

markd

If they thought you were using two different devices, maybe "you", meaning your account, was signed in twice.

Change your Stockcharts password in case someone has guessed it.

dhall6938

Thanks. I sure hope that's not the case. I hope that they were just working on something internally. Hopefully, next week everything will be back as it was.

lmkwin

Grayson did say in this weeks video that The Team is breaking rules. So it's possible they have been messing things up a bit.

I find alerts to be hit and miss. I have one that is supposed to trigger every hour, but it only sends results once a day and it often has some inaccurate results from my review, but..... it could be a spike data point that triggers it and then it doesn't pick up anything new that meets the criteria that day. I don't know.

Most of my alerts (and scans) are PnF related and the charts are constructed differently than time based charts but the one that I'm less than impressed with is one that is looking at ROC(2).

dhall6938

As you probably remember, I have just recently started using alerts. I have noticed that only one alert will be sent per day even if another symbol actually triggers the alert during the same day. So, I have created a separate alert for each signal, I'm only scanning two symbols. I have also noticed that I may get an alert during the first two minutes but not to trust them. Don't know why and I have not tried to figure it out but the alerts that I get during the first two minutes have to be verified manually. My scans / alerts are extremely intricate or complicated and lengthy compared to yours I think, but they seem to work fine most days. I have figured out that if you want the same alert to alert you again during the same day, you will need to rename it so that it thinks it's a different alert. I don't really use them that way so I can't say that it's reliable, but it worked the time or two that I tried it. Didn't know that alerts could be set to run every hour. That is interesting though

dhall6938

I have also noticed that an alert might trigger but when I try to verify it by running my scan manually, the scan won't pick it up until price has crossed whatever price triggered the alert. The alerts seem to be much more sensitive than my scans.

lmkwin

I don't know if there are data corrections that occur in the price feed or something else occurring. I get similar situations with the Nasdaq Dorsey Wright program also. I work with different patterns that I've described here before. 3 consecutive sell signals followed by a column of X at least 7X's in length on the traditional high/low price pnf chart.

So I'll have a chart saved into a watchlist and then upon reviewing it days or weeks or months later, it's not the same chart as it was when I added it to the watchlist. That sort of thing happens to me. Not a lot, but it happens.

All you need to do it change a high or low price in a column reversal area to potentially change the appearance of the chart. Or a data adjustment, like dividends that may get inserted into the data well after the fact.

dhall6938

Interesting. The odd quirks sometimes take a very long time to notice, especially if they are on a longer term chart like the weekly. It took quite a few years for me to realize that the weekly MACD will adjust during the day but the scan engine may or may not pick up the change during that same day. Anyway, my alerts appear to be working fine this morning, thank goodness. Appreciate you guys a lot.

lmkwin

I get an alert from TD Ameritrade via their Markit On Demand that reads "Market Alert: Stocks hitting a new 52 week high or low for Nasdaq, NYSE and AMEX." They send it around 10am every trading day. It's always 10 names (or less) for each section of high and low.

It appears that they presort it so that the ones that moved the most "today" make the list that is sent. So it is basically dominated by low priced issues most of the time. And I would assume things that moved from open of trading to when they send the report. Not a very useful report. I've mentioned this to them and they are aware of the limitation.

TD Ameritrade has a "Portfolio Planner" tool. This tool mischaracterizes and/or ignores the investments in the portfolio it's "analyzing". So it may or is only looking at portfolio positions that match what the programmers have listed in their accepted positions for classifications but displays such pretty pie charts. So this means that you can have a 100k portfolio, for example, and only 50k is being classified and used in the planner tool. It's not like they don't have a classification available for everything. Just somethings are not recognized as being accepted in the planner tool. I've mentioned this to them and they are aware of the limitation.




Now, they don't disclose any of this. You have to find it, and be aware of it. They'll fix it, if or when they get around to working on that area of the system. Very similar to the responses that I get from StockCharts.com when talking about errors and omissions. They'll address it if or when they get around to working on that.

lmkwin

If you use IBD (Investors.com) for reviews and lists, on the daily "Stocks on the Move" listings they show a volume % change. During the trading day this number is projected and is not final or true until after the close and volume is finalized. They use a % change vs the 50 DMA

"Percentage change calculations are based on a projected volume figure.

The projected volume of a stock is based on the total number of shares traded and the time of day. After the market close, this data item is updated using reported closing volume numbers."

StockCharts.com has added a filter like this called RVOL which stands for Relative Volume. You can put in a time parameter and it will compare the current volume to the moving average you put in for the parameter.

https://school.stockcharts.com/doku.php?id=technical_indicators:rvol

Although you can only "see" the RVOL indicator in ACP, you can use it, and several other ACP only indicators on the Scan and Alert workbenches.

dhall6938

Thank you. I don't have a subscription to IBD any longer and I don't have an account with Ameritrade either, but all my friends have one, lol. Now, I have an account with SC and IB are my brokers. That's it, and I kind of like it that way, lol. If everything works the majority of the time, it's all I want. I don't trade stocks any longer. I only trade indexes now, it's so much easier. I am down to only trading SPX mostly using leveraged ETF's. I don't like having to deal with the unpredictable gaps that the ETF's produce when they make their overnight adjustments or whatever it is that they do to them but most of the time I can manage them pretty well. If you're interested, Morpheus is a small group of traders that offers a newsletter with a subscription. I liked them because they are honest and what they do is very simple and easy to understand. You won't get rich trading with them, but you'll never wonder if they are honest and real or not.