What "alert architecture" means
Swing traders work over horizons of days to weeks. You can't watch the screen continuously, and you shouldn't — the best setups for swing trading are time-insensitive in the short term. You want to be paged when something changes, not be glued to a chart.
A good alert architecture has four layers:
- Entry alerts — fire when a stock reaches a level you'd buy at
- Stop alerts — fire when an open position breaches your stop
- Signal alerts — fire when technical conditions trigger
- Filing alerts — fire when material news drops on stocks you care about
Set them once, react when they fire. No continuous monitoring required.
The four-layer setup
Layer 1: entry alerts
For every stock on your watchlist where you have a target entry price, set an alert.
- Pull-back entries — price alert below current (you'd buy on a dip)
- Breakout entries — price alert above current (you'd buy on confirmation)
- Sequential alerts — for a stock you want at multiple levels, set 2–3 alerts at different prices
The alerts fire once until you manually re-arm them. Reset becomes available after the saved cooldown (60 minutes by default; configurable from 1 minute to 7 days), and the control shows the remaining wait. Changing the cooldown after a firing does not shorten that wait. Rearming can fire again if the condition still matches; it does not require a new price crossing.
Price and technical alerts are evaluated every 2 minutes during scheduled market-hours runs. Price, technical and conviction alerts share a limit of 5 Free, 50 Pro or 250 Max firings per UTC day, resetting at 5:30 AM IST. An alert refused at the daily limit stays armed for a later check and sends no notification. Deleting/recreating alerts does not reset that account-wide count.
Layer 2: stop alerts
For every open position, set a stop alert at your predetermined stop price.
This is the most important layer for swing trading. The biggest losses come from stops you forgot to monitor. With a stop alert, the platform pages you when price hits the level — you don't have to remember.
Two flavours:
- Hard stop — set the alert; when it fires, you exit
- Soft stop — set the alert; when it fires, you re-evaluate (look at why it broke, check conviction, then decide)
Most beginners benefit from hard stops. Most experienced swing traders use soft stops with discipline. Either works; mixing them within a single position doesn't.
Layer 3: signal alerts
For specific signals you trust on stocks you're already interested in:
- 52-week high breakout on watchlist stocks — fires when a stock you're watching breaks its 1-year high
- MACD bullish crossover on stocks in your "wait for confirmation" pile
- Volume spike on under-the-radar stocks
These bridge the gap between "stock I've heard of" and "stock I should look at right now".
Layer 4: filing alerts
Configured at Settings → Notifications:
- Materiality filter: Material + Context (recommended)
- Watchlist filter: ON (only push for watched stocks)
- Category mutes: decide which categories you actually care about
For swing trading, the highest-impact filings are: earnings, large order wins, M&A announcements, regulatory orders. Mute categories like General Updates and Conference Call Transcripts unless you specifically want them.
How to deliver the alerts
Three channels, ordered by latency and intrusiveness:
- Push notifications (mobile app) — fastest, most intrusive. Default for everything.
- WhatsApp (Pro) — fast, low intrusion. Good for filings specifically.
- In-app only — slowest, lowest intrusion. Good for low-priority signal alerts.
A useful pattern: push for stop alerts (you need to react fast), WhatsApp for filings (you'll read in batches), in-app for signal alerts (you'll check when you next open the platform).
Maintenance — the weekly alert review
Once a week, open Alerts:
- Triggered but un-actioned — review what happened. Either delete (it's stale) or re-arm (the level is still relevant)
- Armed but never triggered for 6+ weeks — usually stale. Delete or adjust the level.
- Open positions without stop alerts — most common gap. Set them.
A clean alerts list is a working alerts list. A list full of stale triggers means you've stopped trusting your own system.
Quiet hours
Most swing traders benefit from quiet hours overnight (22:00–08:00 IST). Stop alerts fire during market hours anyway; filing alerts can wait until morning for most material filings.
Set quiet hours at Settings → Notifications.
What this system protects against
- Forgotten stops — the biggest single source of preventable losses
- Missed entries — a level you'd buy at that you didn't notice because you were doing something else
- Late filings reaction — the filing-alert push beats reading the news the next morning by a wide margin
What this system can't help with
- Bad setup selection — alerts don't make a bad trade good
- Wrong stop placement — alerts fire wherever you set them; if your stops are placed badly, the alerts fire badly
- Emotional reaction — alerts deliver information; what you do with it is your discipline, not the platform's
Build your alert system