What do I do with the alerts?
The alerts are notifying you an event has occurred. This is an opportunity to trade the stock on the event, or invest in the company. For alerts from bullish scenarios, the stock usually rises. For bearish scenarios, the stock usually falls. There are a variety of ways to trade or invest based off the scenario events.
At the bottom of this page, we link to help text of specific strategies for specific scenarios.
This page covers general information related to ALL scenarios and alerts.
Before trading or investing, there are some important caveats to understand about the alerts and events on LevelFields:
- A bad earnings report can alter the bullish event's impact. For example, if a company reports earnings below market expectations and on the same day announces a large stock buyback, the stock may fall instead of rising on the bad earnings report. It's essential to check the earnings dates on the alerts to determine if the day you received the alert coincides with an earnings announcement. If it does, you need to read the earnings announcement before investing in the stock.
- Negative sentiment in the broader market can kill a trade. If the stocks indexes (e.g. S&P 500) are very negative (>.5%), the market sentiment may force other traders to sit out the day's trading action. As a result, a bullish event may not perform as well as it would during bullish days. This can occur on large macro events, like Federal Reserve meetings, policy changes, or economic reports like the CPI (inflation) reports. Check the SPX futures and SPY before trading.
- Check the time of the alert. If you don't notice the alert until a day or two later, it might be too late to trade on it depending on the scenario type. Some scenarios move fast, others are longer term.
- Look at the average 1Day price move in the scenario. This exists to show you how most stocks, in aggregate, are affected by share price. NOTE: stocks from different sectors are affected a bit differently by the events. Using the filters, you can quickly see how stocks from different sectors are affected. You can use this information to determine the exit price if you're trading the event for a day trade.
You can also use the Table View to look at price moves of previous events over longer time frames.
Time Matters
As a general rule, the more time that passes after an alert, the more time there is for the rest of the market to learn about it and react. Events that occur afterhours may be largely priced in by the opening time of the market the next trading day. For example, there's 14.5 hours between an alert that happens at 5pm ET and the next day's open at 9:30am.
For this reason, some users prefer to set their alerts for events that only happen at certain times of day.
You can easily do this in the alert settings.
Go to Dashboard-->My Alerts and click on the bell icon next to the custom alert you've setup. Then drag the circles on the bar to set alert coverage for a particular window of time.
The alert setting below will only alert you to events that happen between 12am and 8am ET.
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