In recent years, software has been developed to help traders, including daytraders, to sort through on a real time basis the voluminous market data being generated every day. For example, a trader interested in monitoring a particular stock on the New York Stock Exchange may wish to be notified in real time when the symbol associated with the stock reaches a 52-week high, or a 52-week low, or comes within a pre-specified percentage from the 52-week high or 52-week low. Software has been developed to provide real time alerts based on user-provided criteria for such situations. For example, the Trade-Ideas software allows a user to specify symbols in which he is interested and various events associated with the symbol will generate an alert. NexTrend has also provided the Filescan product to provide a similar service.
Traders, however, still face a problem of receiving too many alerts (“noise”), and not enough quality or relevant information of the type that is of interest to them upon which trades are warranted (“quality signals”). A related problem is that systems known to date do not provide a sufficient level of granularity to the trader to allow for customization—to generate alerts tailored to the needs to the user. For example, instances of a certain market pheonomenon may be repeated and the user may wish to focus only when they follow within a certain period of time. Further, combinations of user criteria in connection with a given symbol for generating an alert are not sufficiently provided for in current market alert systems. In addition, the user may wish to be alerted when news affecting companies or securities is reported.