

Ask HN: Review QuoteSentinel, personalized stock price notifications - ezl
http://quotesentinel.com

======
tansey
I think it's a nice site, but I don't know why someone would pay for the
feature.

\- Your motivating example is someone who wants to buy or sell a stock at a
certain price threshold. Why wouldn't you just set a limit order or a stop-
limit order? Both are available from virtually ever broker.

\- I don't see which exchanges you support. Is it just the NYSE and NASDAQ? Do
you support European exchanges?

What would probably be helpful is if you created a way for me to specify some
complex criteria about the time, price movement qualities, technical
indicators, etc. For example, I could imagine being long MSFT at $25 and
wanting an update if the price drops by more than $0.25 in less than 5 minutes
and the DMI is less than 30. I believe some brokers actually offer this kind
of algo trading already, though I'm not sure whether they also allow for only
sending updates.

As a side note, if you offered an API of some sort and allowed me to specify a
time (e.g., I want the closing price of the 9:30 bar) and you covered all
major global markets/indices (I'm interested in HSI, DAX, FTSE, CAC, TOPIX,
ASX), then I would probably be willing to pay $10 a month for that service if
you had live prices. However, I imagine you would run into serious data
licensing issues (if you're not already?).

~~~
ezl
Tansey,

Thanks for the feedback. I will clarify that these are US equities.

The target market for now is somewhere around casual investors who invest
themselves in the market generally, but less than professional customers that
require exchange specificity.

I think the notion of complex filters is a good idea, but I am unlikely to get
to it -- Including complex algo trading (or notifications based on those
signals) becomes a monster project very quickly and suddenly trying to compete
in the space of real Goliaths.

You hit the nail on the head though about "only sending updates". That's sort
of exactly the service I needed a few months ago and couldn't find one I
liked. Of course executions can be done with just stops and limits, but there
have been times I've been filled after a news event and wished I had been
there to insert the human decision making process between signal and trade.

------
ezl
Clickable: <http://quotesentinel.com>

I'd prefer you look it through, but if you want to cut to the chase, log in
using: username: hn@quotesentinel.com password: hn

or register for a free account: <https://quotesentinel.com/register/free>

Quote Sentinel lets users set prices of interest for US stocks, then sends
SMS/email notification when that condition is met.

------
dirtae
As others have mentioned, you can already do this on Yahoo Finance for free.
Notifo also allows you to set up free stock price alerts:
<http://notifo.com/user/stockalerts>

It's certainly possible for you to do a better job than those services, but if
you want me to pay, your site needs to explain exactly why you're better than
them.

~~~
ezl
Thanks Dirtae.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but my understanding is that it only serves iphone
users (blackberry/android pending).

I suspect that iPhone (and generally smart phone) users will be less likely
customers though, because its generally easier for them to check prices from
their phone than for mobile users like me (no smart phone).

I certainly can't expect to be able to serve everyone who wants stock
information. But I was right in my target market, so I'm crossing my fingers
that there are others as well.

------
ritonlajoie
Something strange (my point of view), the pricing page listing is from high to
low. imho this should be the reverse.

Also, you are not telling (I haven't found the info) if your source is a
realtime provider, or not, (nor whom). I think this is very important..

Good luck with your service and congratulations for the launch.

------
pdx
I've been looking for a realtime quote API that's good and affordable. What
service are you using?

------
rguzman
It seems that HN is not the target audience for this. The folks here probably
need much more sophisticated tools and likely build those tools themselves.

Who is this intended for?

------
cake
Very clean and polished site, well done.

It would be great to be able to see the full name of the stock, currency and
last update time.

------
brosephius
yahoo finance already does this for free, as do many brokerages. what's your
competitive advantage?

~~~
ezl
Good question brosephius.

I was not/am not aware that yahoo finance and other brokerages do it for free.
Didn't find it immediately with a quick Google search either, so I'd
appreciate the link (though I found another site that is new to me and seems
to provide similar service)

At the time I wrote it, I couldn't find other instances of this service
online.

I could constantly poll stock prices on my phone to see if my price points had
been reached, but what I wanted was to not have to pay attention and be
notified when an event occurred.

~~~
uptown
You can setup Yahoo stock alerts from here:

<http://alerts.yahoo.com/st_watch_editalert.php>

But anyone that's going to take action on these types of alerts likely already
has a brokerage account with more-advanced alerting capabilities.

~~~
ezl
whoa, +1 uptown. i'm sort of bummed that I didn't know about that before.
Seems like I should have found that.

1\. Have you used this (and did it work)? I just tried registering an alert
and I never got the notification from yahoo, despite the fact that the alert
condition was met. I was also able to set an alert to get notified when SPY
fell to $500 (currently trading 108.70). I also got a 404 in the 3rd step of
the phone registration process, but it somehow saved the number anyways.

2\. I got a 404 in step 3 when i registered my cell phone to receive alerts.

I guess I'm trying to figure out if this service is still operated at all by
yahoo. Of course, it could be equally damning if yahoo decided that its not
worth supporting and just nexted the product.

Regarding brokerages offering alert capabilities: I'd be interested in finding
out more. I use Interactive Brokers personally and Quote Sentinel was
originally actually a python script hooked up to the IB api.

Obviously trying to monetize a service that is being offered for free by many
more established parties isn't the smartest idea... Can't really make excuses
for why I didn't find that earlier though (functional or not).

~~~
uptown
I have no idea whether they maintain it or not, though it's linked to from
every company's summary page within Yahoo! Finance right underneath the chart.
E*Trade offers a similar feature, and I do use that one.

At the very least, I guess you've found that the Yahoo! product isn't the best
... so perhaps there's a market for your product. Something else you may be
interested in is the Google Finance spreadsheet features.

[http://docs.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answe...](http://docs.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=54198)

Not sure whether there's a way you could add a hook to send an alert when
certain prices are met, but their in-spreadsheet stock prices are pretty slick
and very easy to use. Probably not something you could resell, but for
personal use, it's a good tool.

------
bgimpert
Umm, stop orders?

~~~
ezl
I think you're hinting that the existence of stop orders make this
unnecessary. For some people that may be true.

Quote Sentinel only notifies you -- at the time the first Quote Sentinel
script was written, I couldn't find something that would send me a text
message when my limit was about to be triggered.

Basically I personally had 2 main use cases:

1\. I want to go to lunch and I want to be notified if something is happening
and I should come back to my desk.

2\. Markets are dynamic. Today I'd love to buy AAPL 10 bucks lower than it is,
but if the market drops like a rock, it might not seem that great anymore. For
big moves, I'd rather be notified so I can make a decision with the new
information instead of my limit/stop getting filled based on what I thought
was a good idea before.

Its definitely not an app for everyone, but it solved a specific need for me
so I thought it'd be worth turning it into an app for others.

~~~
joshu
One thing I've always wanted is a view of the world that's beta-adjusted.

"Stock is up 7%, but down 1% if you factor in correlation to SPX"

