about scan of day

Green_DL

What is the difference between the scan of :

today's close and close

one day ago's close and yesterday's close

Green_DL

Also when I set up a scan alert, most of the alert notification is sent to me at the market open. Why?
Some of the notifications will be intraday and some will be after close.
Assume the criterias are all met, how the notifications sequences are distributed.

markd

I'll let someone else answer about alerts.

There is no difference between "today's close" and "close".

The scan engine assumes you are scanning in the daily time frame (meaning, unless you say differently by adding modifiers like weekly or monthly, the scan engine will search for daily values - so daily is the default). You don't HAVE to add "today's", BUT it's not wrong if you do. Some people do it for clarity when reading their own code.

Also, there is no difference between "1 day ago close" and "yesterday's close".

The yesterday form is to make the scan language seem user friendly. The 1 day(s) ago form is there to be consistent with the language used to go further back - 2 days ago, 3 days ago, etc. Both do the same thing.

Green_DL

Thanks markd.

For example, now it is 2 pm, how would the machine run today open >....., does it deploy the latest data (intraday) available to scan for the day continuously. That is, the "open" refers to any time during the day. If that is the case,  I should have received more than one alert during the day. (when I receive the first email, I go to the the stockchart and turn the "pause" button to "running")

If in another situation, say now it is 2 pm, for the machine to run "today close", does it mean the machine has to wait till 4 pm to run the scan?

markd

The scan engine considers the most recent intraday update to be the day's close, even though it isn't. I'm pretty sure the open would always be the 9:30 open (or the first price of the day, whenever it occurs on or after 9:30, for the NYSE anyway; at least it used to be that way, there is now "pre-session" trading, I don't know if that counts as the open for stocks traded at that time). The close would keep changing until the session close, and then from time to time after the close until the final after hours update, which occurs around 6:30 pm eastern, I think.

I'm not familiar with how alerts work in practice. But here is the documentation -

https://support.stockcharts.com/doku.php?id=alerts

Also, on your dashboard page, if you click Help and then type in "alerts", it brings up quite a few more links that might help, too.