The contingency of the stock market has always been a deterrent for risk-averse and novice traders on a limited budget. Minor price fluctuations can impact investment decisions if the market rallies up, and stox surge following positive earnings reports.

Luckily, trading apps that have been in business for quite some time have successfully noticed and acted upon this user behavior by introducing the concept of watch lists and price alerts. One noticeable example is mStock, which allows investors to set price alerts for different stocks while allowing the addition of up to 50 stocks or contracts to each of the seven predefined watch lists.

What are price alerts?

Price alerts are notifications that prompt investors to invest in a particular stock when its price reaches or goes above or below a certain threshold. Nearly all leading stock market apps, like mStock and Motilal Oswal, offer price alert features within their app, although the name of this feature may differ from app to app. 

How to set price alerts?

While the exact process of setting up a price alert would differ between apps, there are two fundamental metrics for which alerts can be set across all platforms – when the stock price goes above a certain amount or when it goes below a certain amount. 

Some more sophisticated apps may provide additional parameters for setting up alerts, such as total buy and sell quantity, intraday change percentage, etc.

What are the benefits of setting price alerts?

• Prompt action on investment opportunities: Both novice and experienced investors must be mindful and realistic about the returns they’re expecting on different investments. This implies that not all values of a stock may be justified if an investor suspects low growth potential in that particular stock. However, there may be certain price points at which a stock becomes attractive to buy or sell based on an investor’s analysis. That’s where price alerts can be useful. For example, if an investor thinks that a particular stock is currently overpriced, they can set up an alert for the stock’s support level. Receiving a low price alert for a highly volatile stock can encourage more mindful and prompt investing.

• Peace of mind: Investing can be a stressful activity for investors who fear losses, which, to some extent, is a trait common in all investors. Without access to real-time price movements and trading data, investors may find themselves lurking around the charts and dashboards in apps like mStock, Angel One and other stock market apps. Setting price alerts eliminates the stress of having to constantly and manually check stock prices. 

• Quick identification of trends: Price alerts can be used together with watch lists to identify trends in a particular market segment. 

Consider this scenario – if an investor wants to groww their portfolio by adding more tech stocks, they can create a watch list of all the tech stocks they’re interested in. In mStock, the advanced sorting features embedded into watch lists can help investors easily identify market trends. If price alerts are set for certain stocks in a watch list, their occurrence across most stocks at the same time can validate the investor’s interpretation and confirm that there is a noticeable trend.

To conclude, price alerts are a minor yet useful feature of many stock market trading apps. Apps like mStock have not only increased the convenience of trading through the price alert feature but have also significantly enhanced the user experience.