Understanding the Trading Below Alert

Trading below occurs when someone sells a stock for less than the best bid. This alert typically signifies a temporary condition where a stock is suddenly more volatile than normal. Often this is caused by traders who know that the stock price is about to change quickly, so they choose the fastest execution venue rather than attempting to get the cheapest one. Highly experienced short term traders may choose to join the action, in anticipation of a fast change in the stock price. Longer term traders still take note of this condition because it is a leading indicator of which stocks will have interesting activity. This signal is strongest when there are multiple events for the same stock in a short period of time. When this happens the alerts server will group multiple events into the same alert.

Default Settings

By default, the trading below alert appears when someone sells a stock for less than the best bid.

Custom Settings

For 'Trading Below' 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', 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 4 times" to indicate that this alert includes 4 different prints that were lower than the best bid. If it just says "Trading below" 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' 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.