Worden TC2000 Alerts — How to set up price, trend line, and complex conditional alerts

In this Worden TC2000 foundations series lesson we are going to be covering all things alerts. We’re going to walk through the main alert console, demonstrate how to set up alerts using prices, trendlines, complex conditional alerts, and much more. We’ll also explain what the difference is between alerts and scans all to help you streamline your trading and get the most out of the TC2000 software.

This lesson was intended as a video walkthrough guide so it is highly recommended you follow along by watching the video below so you can see visually where everything is in the platform. We did include the transcript below if you want to quickly search on any terms but it will be hard to follow along without the visual component. Please enjoy!

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Video timestamps

• 0:00 Introduction
• 2:01 Navigating the alert console: Active alerts, notification settings
• 6:37 Setting a price alert: restarting alerts, writing descriptions
• 10:35 How to create condition (scan) alerts
• 15:50 How to create a reminder alert
• 16:40 Creating alerts using trend lines and horizontal lines
• 18:39 Differences between stock alerts and stock scans

Video transcript

Hello. My name is Evan Medeiros from thetraderisk.com. I will be your tour guide throughout this Worden TC2000 Foundation Series. I’ve been trading since 2009, and I’ve been a Worden customer for nearly as long. My background is Computer Science and I’ve spent a lot of time writing custom scans, indicators, watch list columns for myself, and as a service to thousands of traders, just like you. Once you get done with this video, you want to check out the other guides we have on our channel, and on our website, you’ll find plenty more TC2000 resources, including free downloads available for you as well. And now let’s get onto today’s lesson.

In today’s video we’re going to be looking at alerts in TC2000. Now, alerts are super important to a trader’s process, because it can help streamline and bring your attention to something important or significant that is happening in the market. That’s something that you may otherwise miss, because you are just looking at too many other stocks. Maybe you step away from your computer for the afternoon and something important that you wanted to see happen actually happens. So in these circumstances, in these cases, you want to have alerts set up.

You should get comfortable using the alert system here in TC2000, because it can just save you a tremendous amount of time and just keeps you on top of thousands of different stocks and market conditions that can happen. So in this video, we’re going to show you first, just the basic structure of alerts, how to get things set up, and then we’re going to look at some more advanced ways to set up alerts.

It’s not just price alerts. You can actually do a lot more sophisticated notifications here in TC2000. So first and most importantly, where our alerts are, if you follow my mouse up here, you can see, we have an alerts button in TC2000. When you click on that, you have a few different options. First, you can just set an alert and there’s lots of different places you can set alerts. So the first obviously clicking on here, setting an alert. And what this is going to do is set an alert on whatever your main chart is, whatever ticker you’re looking at, that’s what it’s going to be using as the underlying symbol. I’m going to come back to this in just a minute.

Navigating TC2000 alert console: Active alerts, notification settings

We’re first going to go to the alert console, which is your main dashboard for alerts. And so if you bring up this, you can see that we’ve got a couple of different options. We’ve got a list down here in the middle, and we’re going to walk through a couple of these. So once again, you can see in the alert console, we have this set alert functionality. So they give us to many different places. And this is another place you can add alerts. We have notifications, so I’m going to click on this.

This is where you really only need to set up once, but you’re going to want to set your email and or phone number. So the beautiful part about alerts here in TC2000 is they have this native integration here of a text SMS that you can get sent to your phone. So once again, if you step away from your computer you’re out, you’re walking the dog you can get a notification to say, “oh! I should have taken action on something I need to get back” so that’s a real neat kind of part.

Then you do have these other options down here of popping up a message, which would appear in the bottom, right of TC2000 when this alert occurs. And then you can also have a little chime that occurs as well. These are settings you basically only have to set up once. If you don’t have anything in here, add your email and your phone number. If you want to get those notifications, and then you’ll be good to go.

We’re going to click, okay, there, that’s the first step to getting alerts to your computer, and the rest here we’re going to look at the different ways we can set alerts. In this main table, you can see there’s two alerts. I have currently active. I know that they’re active because of this little green button, or dot if the alert was off or if it had already occurred, that dot would be red. I know that these are two active alerts that are being monitored by TC2000 for me right now, couple of other things we can note is we have the status.

Right now, this is saying not passing, which basically means it’s not triggering. It’s not happening. And that’s why that green dot is still there because it’s active and it’s armed. Now, if we look on the right hand side here, we have alert details and we have chart. So I can actually, if I click on this chart, I can pull up a chart of the alert or a chart of the symbol that I am monitoring with the alert on the bottom.

I’m going to get into the more sophisticated alerts like this. But if I just zoom out here, you can see that whenever you get a big spike here, this is basically saying, so this is when an alert occurred. This is when an alert occurred and that’s it. You can see this doesn’t happen all that often. This is a good example of why I may want to set an alert for something that’s fairly infrequent that I’m probably going to miss because it only occurs once every year.

This is something we’ll talk about in just a moment, but this is a cool way just to visually pull up the chart that I set the alert on with the alert history plotted as an indicator. You can also see this stop monitoring button here. So this will just effectively kill off the alert. If I click that, I’m not going to click that. And then we also have alert details where you can essentially see just more of the information of when I created the alert, and what the alert name is, and what symbol it’s on, when the alert expires, any notes I put in here.

Then once again you’re just presented with this chart, which you can zoom out and again, see when the alerts have historically triggered. So this is the core functionality. And so now that we kind of know the lay of the land here, there’s a few other spots we can create alerts, but first let’s get into one.

Setting a price alert: restarting alerts, writing descriptions

At its core I think what most people are using alerts for most technical traders is that they are looking at a chart. So we’ve got Tesla on here, and they are going to want to be reminded; or notified when a price level is crossed. That is the basic. And so for instance, let’s just put one on right now for Tesla and we want to be notified if it goes to all time highs. This was the all-time high price right back here in January, 2021 so the price was at $900.40. So let’s set an alert for that level.

We showed you here, you can put set price, you can go into the alert console. You can also just right click on the chart, and then you can also set an alert this way. So what you could do is you can click on this, create price alert. Now the only tricky part here is that we going to have to get it exactly right. So you can see I right clicked at 901.99. That’s not exactly what I wanted, but I’m just going to click on that for now. And you can see that I can actually edit this price so I can actually say, oh, okay. It was actually $900.40 is where I wanted the alert.

You’ve got a couple of different options here. First is Tesla, that’s the symbol. So we already know that that’s good, but we could also change it now if we wanted to, we have this option to restart the alert when it triggers. This is an important one to take a look at, because this is going to essentially say, is this just a one-time alert that you want to be notified for, or do you want to just keep constant updates when this happens throughout time?

If you always just want to know, “Hey! every time Tesla crosses over $900.40, I want to be known,” because maybe you’ll consider it a significant level, then you would probably want to click this checkbox. And then when you click the checkbox, you actually have some options. So when do you want the alert to trigger? Minute later, five minutes later, 15 minutes later, an hour later the next day and you can essentially set that. Maybe you only want to see one notification per day. Then you would say, okay, let’s restart it the next day. Here, you have a choice to monitor for a certain amount of time.

You may only care about Tesla hitting those all-time highs in the next month. And if it can’t do it in the next month, then you don’t even care about it anymore. And so you have the option to essentially choose to monitor this over a certain lifespan. So let’s go one month, and then you have the optional description. This could be used as helpful notes, so I want to buy Tesla when it crosses all time highs in some circumstances, when you get to these more rare alerts or complex conditions, you may actually want to have a note here. Like why did I set up this alert in the first place?

If you fill in some description here, when this alert triggers, the description will display and you can clearly understand, oh right. Maybe I set that alert, you know, a long time ago. Oh, now I know why I did it.

Then you also have the default notification settings, or you can click on the use these settings so you can change if you want to change it. to a different notification method, you have those options as well. This is the core way we set up an alert. I’m going to click, okay and it’s going to tell me that my alerts have been created and I can go view in the alerts manager that we looked at earlier.

What you’ll notice is, we now have Tesla on here price $900.40 you can see as I hover over this, I’ve got that description that I wrote in there. And if I click on the chart, I can easily just pull up a quick chart of Tesla here and see what it looks like basically. So that’s the very basic way to set an alert that is a price alert, a certain amount of time. We chose the notification settings. We put in a description and now we have our alert ready to notify us when it occurs.

How to create TC2000 condition (scan) alerts

Let’s go a little more complex. Let’s actually now go to something where we want to know if Tesla is actually breaking out on heavy volume. Okay? So this is much different. Now this is a much more complex alert. We’re not just saying we want to see Tesla over $900.40; we want to see it over $900.40 and we want to see it on heavy volume. So how can we do that? Well, we’re going to have to set up a condition. We’re going to have to write some code or use the indicators in the built-in indicators in TC2000 to make that happen.

First thing we can go back to our alert console, and we’re going to click on the plus set alert, and we’re going to put now a condition. So instead of price, which is what we chose last time, we’re going to choose condition. And now we get something where we have a lot more complexity here. So this is essentially the power of easy scans or custom PCF language at your fingertips for alerts. And this is something that I don’t think many traders probably take as much advantage of as they should, because this gets to be some pretty powerful notifications basically.

Now let’s start from the top and let’s say, okay, this alert name is Tesla breaking new highs on volume, right, that’s going to be my alert name. We have a lot of the similar settings here. So we have monitor for a maximum of we’ll choose one year or no, we’ll go one month as it was restart the alert the next day, you can fill in the description, breakout on volume. Now we have some other things at our, at our fingertips. We have this single timeframe mixed timeframe, and I’m not going to go too, in-depth on the scanning on the condition builder, because we are going to do a future video on this, but we can essentially say where, what do you want to see this occur on? What timeframe do you want to see this occur on?

In this particular case, we care about the daily chart because we’re looking for a daily breakout and you could also choose mixed timeframes and that’s just going to make it. So each of these conditions down here, we can then choose a specific timeframe. We’re keeping things simple on this example, we’re just going to click on daily and now we have a conditions window down here. We have all of the power of easy scans and conditioned buildings and sets and all of that fun stuff. Again, we are not going to go into all of the options here, cause we’re going to do that in a different video, but we’re going to just show you how to set up the high volume breakout to new highs. So what we would do is we would go to right formula, and we are now going to code in our behavior that we want to see.

First we’re going to have breakout to new highs. And in this case, it’s a close over $900.40. That’s it! That’s what’s going to get us the condition, that’s going to say, okay, price is now over $900.40. That means it broke out to new highs, but we also had something else. Let’s just put it on a different condition, and we going to say heavy volume. And in this case, we’re going to say, well, we want that first condition to be true, but we also want the volume today to be greater than the average volume over the past 50 trading sessions.

We can write it simply like this. So this would just say the volume today and today, meaning the day it crosses over $900.40 has to be greater than the average volume of the past 50 trading sessions. And that’s it. Those are two conditions that we just applied in here and we can click. Okay, and there we go. Our alerts been created. We can go to view alerts now and we can see that we now have the two Tesla alerts. We have the $900.40 price move. Then we also have the Tesla break into new highs on volume, which again, if you hover over this, it shows you that you’re essentially built a scan that is looking at those two conditions. This is really, really powerful. You can imagine all of the possibilities you have.

In fact, I didn’t want to go into the complexity earlier, but notice these two alerts that you saw already set up on my alert window. These were golden cross and death cross alerts. So these weren’t just price alerts. These were looking for when the Dow Jones experiences a golden cross or a death cross, that’s the 50 SMA crossing over 200 SMA or vice versa. And I was doing that for an article or a video that I actually published on coding that up, backtesting it; and all that fun stuff. So I wanted to get some real occurrences on when that occurred, so I could use that in my video.

These are ways to create more complex alerts and they are very powerful. I encourage you to sort of explore and see what you can build there because again, they can certainly take some time to occur.

How to create a TC2000 reminder alert

A couple of final things here is you can create a reminder alert. So this is just like a reminder that you would set in your, in your calendar, but you can tie it to a stock and you can again, fill in the description. If you’re working in TC2000 throughout the day, sometimes, you just want to take notes in this platform. And so if I have this Tesla stock here, I might want to say, well, remind me next week to check on all time high progress, just to see how fast and I miss type that progress progress. And there we go! We can choose our different settings. We click, okay. The alerts been created, hit okay.

Here’s a reminder that we’re going to get, and we’re going to say, let’s just check in to see how this, how this is looking. And that’s another way we can use alerts.

Creating alerts using trend lines and horizontal lines

Now, a couple of other fun ways to build more complex alerts is you can draw trend lines on your chart and you can in fact, click on those trend lines and you can set an alert. And this alert is going to basically look for Tesla, the stock crossing this trend line. And so now you actually have the power of a diagonal or custom drawn trendline that you can have the system monitor and notify for you. So once again, this is a perfect illustration. This is a daily chart. This is a trend line, right? This one might be, you know, Tesla is breaking down, look out. So that might be the note I want to put on this.

I might say, you know, this time, I don’t need it to restart. I just need to know this once. And I want to check on this for two years. I just want to know when it breaks this trend line, just let me know. And this might not occur for a long time, might not ever occur, but it could, it might not occur for a long time. So again, I want the next two year long outlook. Click, okay. Alerts been created, and there you go. I now have a trend alert set on Tesla. Currently the status is we are above trend, but that will go red when we cross down and I will get that notification. So trend lines on alerts on trend lines, very powerful. I believe you can do it with the horizontal line as well. So again, if we wanted to draw some, our custom resistance in here, maybe it’s $866, you care about not the all time highs.

You can click on that line, clicks the alert, and you will get an alert created for you when Tesla crosses that particular line. So that is very cool as well, and very powerful to sort of get the, the sort of custom diagonal nature of a trend line last but not least.

TC2000 stock alerts VS stock scans

A lot of people get confused between scanning and alerts. There’s a big distinction here, and they overlap because like we talked about, you can build conditions in the alerts. You can build these custom conditions, and you can use them as alerts. The difference is, is that in alert must be tied to a particular stock. You need to have a symbol that you want to monitor for a certain set of conditions to occur.

I’d have to say, okay, I want to be notified when Tesla breaks out to all time highs, what you couldn’t do is you couldn’t say, I want an alert, anytime a stock breaks out to new all-time highs.  The “any” doesn’t quite work, you need to know the number or the list of stocks that you want the alert to be tied to. That is a common question that I get, and have to explain is that alerts must be tied to symbols. scans, just general scans can be created on an entire universe and unknown universe to you. So there’s a difference, there’s a little bit of separation there on creating alerts and knowing the underlying symbol that you essentially want to monitor.

I think covers just about everything that I wanted to discuss on alerts. There’s probably a few little details that I left out, but I think we got the bulk of it. I think hopefully showed you some cool ways to use them and some more complex ways to use them.

As always, I always like to ask, if you have any other thoughts or experience, if you’re a TC2000 power user? And you’ve got more thoughts, leave a comment below, let’s help others that are watching and learning from this video.

Finally, don’t forget, we have a lot more TC2000 guides on our channel, as well as resources and downloads on our website.

Have a great day and good luck trading!