Setting up alerts: Should be a few minutes on each one depending on your setup.
Chart watching: Much, much less – let your computer do the monitoring for you, around the clock, on as many instruments as you care to follow.
Trading stresses: Significantly lower!
Trade alerts
The icing on the cake for us, in automating our chart indicators and analysis, is that we can set certain criteria to give us a message on screen, or send us an email / text message, when there’s something of interest to check – freeing up the rest of our time to do much less laborious, and more interesting things.
Of course there is no substitute in your trading learning curve from spending a certain amount of time looking at charts and seeing how price movements evolve – which we hope you will find a much quicker experience with our handy MetaTrader Indicators to help you learn.
Once you have a strategy and understanding of what is important to your targets and risk levels, there’s no need to watch price charts all the time until they happen. Simply set your criterial for alerts and just come back to the charts then you need to.
Even if you are watching the your markets, it is easy to become distracted, blind to certain information or overwhelmed from looking at too many markets. Using alerts you can give yourself a periodic summary reminder for the information of interest, to help focus your attention, and find those high-probability setups that we all like.
What to know and when
Much of our trading is based on bar closes – when an entire unit of our chosen timeframe has completed it contains all the open, high, low and close (OHLC) information that we use to look for possible trade setups. So we have alerts setup on the hourly and daily timeframe to email the information to us. We can see them on our desktop, laptops or smartphones, and use them to decide whether to get onto the charts for a look, or just use them as reassurance of just the latest price information when managing trades.
It is also possible to receive alerts for things like significant news releases coming up, when trades hit targets or stops and how trades are performing within our risk management monitoring.
Managing emotions and discipline
When you choose your timeframe to trade and targets based on that timeframe, it can at first be quite difficult not to be tempted to check prices more often in between bars and try to micro-manage your trades.
If you are doing this too regularly you might want to consider adjusting your trading plan to trade that timeframe. However, if you are not able to check the lower-timeframes regularly enough, you risk eroding your higher-timeframe edge.
Alerts can help your retain your trading-plan discipline and avoid the stress of wondering what is happening with prices when you can’t check the charts. Make no mistake, trading real live money can be stressful if you are risking too much for your circumstances per trade, or trying to trade a timeframe lower than you can monitor.
Once you have your alerts set you can relax in-between trades, knowing that you will get a message if something happens that you have defined that required your attention. After-all, we are trading for more financial independence and confidence, not to over-whelm ourselves and get distracted from the very real and important parts of a well rounded life outside of trading that keeps us as well balance people, able to make rational and calm trading and investment decisions.
Know your edge and trade with confidence
Now you should have have a better understanding of how we use our analytic methods to test strategy ideas, and then automate how they are presented to us. We want to be time-efficient in our trading and investment management, so we can continue to use the probability edge we are aiming to take advantage of, without getting unrealistically confident, and expecting every single trade a winner.
Do have a look around the websites we recommend on the right, to see what indicators and alerts are out there, and we hope that you will take some time to review the MetaTrader enhancements we have on offer to help you add our experience and research to your trading analysis.
Let the computer do what they do best, so you can make educated decisions using your discretion to make the decisions that computers can’t.
Includes all Profiles, Templates and Indicators, with statistics, screen, email and smartphone alerts.
