An alert is a standing instruction: tell me when this happens, so I do not have to sit here refreshing. You choose what to watch and what counts as “happening”; OptyTrades checks it every hour the market is open and emails you when the condition is first met.

Everything is built from two choices, and it helps to keep them separate in your head:

Those combine freely. “RSI under 30 on SOFI” and “RSI under 30 and IV Rank over 50, across my whole watchlist” are built the same way, from the same two menus.

This is the single most important thing to understand about them: an alert fires when a condition becomes true, not every hour it stays true.

A stock that goes oversold and stays oversold for two weeks sends one email, not fourteen. The rule remembers the state it last saw and only speaks up when that state changes into the one you asked about. Coming back the other way and crossing again is a fresh event, but a rule that has just fired will not fire again for 4 hours, so a price sitting exactly on your level and flickering across it cannot spam you.

One consequence worth knowing: the first time a rule is evaluated it only learns the current state — it never fires on that first look. A rule you create while a stock is already oversold will wait until it recovers and drops again. That is deliberate. Firing immediately on something that was already true before you asked would be reporting history, not news.

Alerts are checked hourly while the US market is open, plus once in the evening after the day's data has been rebuilt. Nothing runs overnight or at weekends, because nothing can move.

Within that, two speeds:

• Prices are current. Price, today's move and anything measured against them come from a fresh snapshot on each check.
• Technical readings are daily. RSI, the moving-average distances, Bollinger position, volume ratio, support and resistance distances are rebuilt once a day after the close. An RSI alert fires on the evening check that follows the day RSI crossed — not the moment it crosses intraday.

The builder tells you this on the form when the rule you are writing uses a daily field. It is stated rather than hidden because the alternative is discovering it while wondering whether the feature is broken.

The simplest rule: a symbol, a condition, and a number. Pick One stock, type the ticker, choose from the condition list, and set the level.

Two conditions are named rather than numeric — the put-selling signal turning green and the call-selling signal turning green. Those fire when the screener's entry signal for that stock flips to green, which is the pullback (or extension) conditions it tracks lining up. Everything else is a number you compare against.

Before you save, the form tells you how many times that rule would have fired in the last 30 days. That number is the point: it is the difference between a nudge and a nag, and it is worth reading before you commit to a level. Where we have no honest history to replay — Wheel Score, Assignment Quality, IV Rank and the fundamentals are rebuilt nightly and not archived per day — it says so instead of guessing.

Each of these is available for one stock, a watchlist, or your positions, and any 3 of them can be combined. The value you type is in the units shown.

One condition on its own is often noise. RSI under 30 happens to plenty of stocks you would never sell a put against. Switch to Combine and add up to 3 clauses: the rule is only “on” when every one of them holds at the same time, and it fires on the moment they all line up.

A worked example, and a reasonable one for a wheel seller:

A stock that has sold off, whose options are paying more than they usually do, sitting on a level the market has defended before. Any one of those three alone would fire constantly; together they are rare enough to be worth an email.

Choose A watchlist instead of a symbol and the same condition is applied to every stock in it — one rule per stock, so they fire independently and each email names the one that moved.

Both kinds of list are offered: the ones you built on the Screener and the built-in ones (Wheel Kings, Fallen Angels and the rest). The curated rosters are rebuilt every night, and the count shown next to each name is today's real membership.

These read your Trade Journal and watch the strike you actually sold — not a level you typed. Choose My open positions and one rule is created for each symbol you hold an open put or covered call on.

Only options are watched — a share lot has no strike to be in or out of the money against. The list is whatever is open when you arm it, so run it again after you open new trades.

These describe a condition and stop there. A put going in the money is a fact about a price and a strike; what to do about it depends on your basis, your cushion and your plan, none of which an alert knows.

This is the one that finds names you are not already following. Build a filter on the Screener, save it, then choose A stock matches my screen and point a rule at it.

It fires on new entrants only. The rule remembers which symbols matched last time and tells you about the ones that are newly in — never “your screen still has 40 matches”, which would arrive every hour forever. One email might read: “3 new names now match your Strong Volume screen: CCL, SOFI, HOOD.”

The screen is evaluated with the same logic the Screener page itself uses, so a saved filter means exactly the same thing in an alert as it does on screen. Change the filter later and the alert follows it — unlike a watchlist, this one is a subscription rather than a snapshot.

The last kind watches us rather than the market. Choose Opty AI & Picks:

The picks alert covers both the weekly publish and the daily entry-signal refresh, and says which happened. The book alerts fire when a book opens or closes a position and name the symbols — not when a price moves inside a position it already held.

An alert that cries wolf gets muted, and then the whole feature is dead to you. Four things stand between you and that:

• Transitions, not states — the rule above. It is doing most of the work.
• A 4-hour cooldown per rule, so a level being flickered across cannot repeat.
• One email per check, however many of your rules fired in it.
• The 30-day preview when you build a rule — the best defence, because it stops the noisy rule from existing.

Anything already noisy can be paused rather than deleted, which keeps the rule and stops the emails. The switch at the top of your rules turns alert email off entirely without touching your other OptyTrades email; it is separate from the newsletter preference on purpose.

You can hold up to 50 rules at once.

Said plainly, so nothing here is a surprise later:

• They are not real time. Hourly during market hours; technical readings once a day. Nothing here is built for reacting within the minute.
• They do not place, size or close anything. An alert is a message. Every decision after it is yours.
• They describe conditions, never advice. “IV Rank crossed 50” is a fact about option pricing. What it is worth is your call.
• They cannot see intraday. A level touched and recovered between two checks may pass unmentioned.