Understanding the Trading Below Specialist Alert

This alert is a subset of the Trading Below alert. This alert only applies to NYSE and AMEX stocks, and they only work during normal market hours. If a print is below the NYSE specialist's bid, then we display a Trading below specialist alert.

Default Settings

By default, the trading below specialist alert appears when a print is below the specialist's bid.

Custom Settings

For 'Trading Below Specialist' 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 an alert for 'Trading Below Specialist', you can filter these alerts based on the number of events that have occurred in a row. Note that not every event causes an alert. Look at the alert description to see how many events were in each specific alert. This filter bunches several alerts together. If several alerts occur in a row, each one will have a higher number associated with it, and each alert will be more likely to satisfy this filter.

Description Column

The description column of your scan will say something like "Trading below specialist 4 times" to indicate that this alert includes 4 different prints that were lower than the best bid. If it just says "Trading below specialist" but doesn't say "times", then this alert only refers to a single print.

Quality Column

Add the quality column to a scan using the 'Trading Below Specialist' alert to see a consolidation of like alerts. It is a number of times for that alert the prints were lower than the best bid.