Understanding the New Low Bid Filtered Alert

This alert is a subset of its unfiltered counterpart. The "New Low Bid (filtered)" alert appears when the bid price for a particular stock reaches a new low within a specified time frame. This alert can be of interest to traders and investors as they may indicate reduced demand and bearish sentiment for a stock. The difference is that when the price quickly changes several times in a row, only one of these alerts will appear. The unfiltered alerts appear once every time the price changes.

Daytraders often prefer to display the unfiltered versions of these alerts on a large set of stocks. The effect is to create a window where the user can quickly see if the market as a whole is moving up or down. Other traders prefer to see fewer, more interesting alerts. For that effect, select these filtered versions of the alerts. Some people create two or more alert windows, some with filtered alerts and some with unfiltered alerts.

Default Settings

By default, no more than one alert per stock will appear each minute. However, if a stock price changes by more basis points than expected, new alerts will be displayed more often. The cutoff point for each symbol is automatically chosen based on volatility.

Custom Settings

For 'New Low Bid (filtered)' alerts, you have the option to use an alert specific filter. This filter is located immediately to the right of the corresponding alert and is always optional. You can decide to leave it blank if you want to receive more alerts, or you can fill it in to restrict the number of alerts you receive.

This filter allows you to specify the quality of the alert. When you set a higher number for this filter, you are telling the alerts server to display only alerts that meet a higher quality standard, resulting in fewer alerts being shown.

When setting a 'New Low Bid (filtered)' alert, you can specify the minimum number of shares on the best bid. If a stock is showing fewer shares when the alert is reported, you will not see the alert. We do not smooth or average this value; all that matters is the value at exactly the time the alert was reported. If you leave this field blank, you will see the most alerts. Some alert types have minimums built into them. You can also set minimums for the entire window. An alert must pass through all of these filters to be displayed.

Description Column

The description column provides insight into the extent of the decrease in the 'new low bid'.

Quality Column

This value represents the number of shares on the bid at the time of the alert.