How an alert works
Pick a stock or a crypto, a price, and whether you care about it going above or below that price. WhatToTrade checks prices in the background about once a minute — with the site and the app closed — and tells you when the line is crossed.
Where it reaches you
- Push to your phone — in the WhatToTrade app, turn on "Push to this phone" on the alert. You can send yourself a test notification from Account.
- Email — once your email address is verified.
- Browser and in-app — a notification in the open site and in your alert history.
You also choose how often an alert can fire. Each time it crosses sends one alert when the price crosses your line, stays quiet while it sits past it, and re-arms when it comes back. At most hourly and once a day send at most one alert per hour or per day while the price is past your line. For stocks there is a market hours only switch, so thin pre-market and after-hours trading does not wake you up. Alerts can be edited after they are set — the level, the direction, how often, and where they go.
Levels worth an alert
- Your exit levels. Your stop and your target on a position you hold — the moments you promised yourself you would act.
- The entry you are waiting for. If the answer to "Should I buy…?" was Wait, set an alert at the price where it would be a better entry instead of checking the chart every day.
- Big round levels and 52-week lows or highs on stocks you follow.
Skip alerts on every 1% wiggle. Too many alerts and you start ignoring all of them, including the one that matters.
Exit plans: alerts with a purpose
On anything in your Portfolio you can write an exit plan — target, stop, trailing stop, review date — and the Portfolio Advisor holds you to it every time it runs. Positions that cross a level are marked in the Portfolio table.
Plans
Free accounts get one active price alert. Premium allows up to 20 active alerts and Pro up to 50, with the hourly and each-cross options. See pricing.
Good to know
- An alert is a message, not an order. WhatToTrade never buys or sells anything for you.
- In a fast market a stock can jump past your level between checks, or gap overnight — the alert tells you the line was crossed, not that you could have traded at exactly that price.