Alerts Are Opt-In
Discovery alerts do not fire until you configure them. There is no default stream switched on behind your back, and an unconfigured setup is silent on purpose. The first notification you receive should be one you deliberately asked for, because an alert you did not choose is one you will learn to ignore, and an alert you ignore is worse than none.
Configuration has four parts: which signals can alert, at what thresholds, on which tickers, and through which channel. Get all four right and your notifications will be few and worth reading.
Per-Signal Thresholds
Thresholds are set independently for each of the five scanners. There is no single global sensitivity dial, and that is the point: the five scanners answer different questions and deserve different bars.
Depending on the scanner, the controls include premium floors, score bars, side, setup type, categories, and badges. A flow signal is naturally shaped by premium and side. A setup signal is shaped by which setup types you actually trade. A news signal is shaped by category. Each scanner exposes the controls that make sense for what it measures.
The practical advantage is that you can be loud on one scanner and nearly silent on another. If you trade anchor confluence and never touch headlines, set a demanding bar on Charm Setups and effectively disable Breaking News, with neither decision affecting the other.
If you are not sure where your bars belong, read Discovery Quick Start first and spend a few sessions watching the tabs unfiltered. Thresholds set from observation hold up; thresholds guessed in advance get retuned every day for a week.
Choosing Your Ticker Source
Every alert configuration draws its universe from one of three ticker sources:
- Your watchlist - alerts only on the names you already track. This is the tightest option and the right default when you have a defined book or a short list of names you actually trade.
- A custom list you manage - a separate list maintained specifically for alerting. Useful when your alert universe is deliberately different from your watchlist, for instance a sector basket you want to hear about but do not want cluttering your main view.
- All covered tickers - the full scanned universe. This is the discovery-oriented choice, appropriate when you want the scanners to find names you were not already thinking about. It is also the loudest, so it pairs best with demanding thresholds.
The most common configuration error is combining all covered tickers with permissive thresholds and then concluding that alerts are noisy. That combination is not noisy by accident; it is asking for everything. Prefer raising the bars over narrowing the source, because a demanding threshold on a wide universe is what surfaces names you would not have found on your own.
Delivery: Push, Discord, or Both
Alerts can reach you two ways, and you can enable either or both.
Mobile push goes to the Trade Echo app on iOS and Android. This is the right channel for anything you need to act on inside a session, since it reaches you away from the desk.
Discord routes alerts into your own channel through a webhook you supply. This is the better channel when you want a durable, searchable, timestamped record, or when a small team needs to see the same signals at the same time. Because the messages land in a channel you control, they persist and scroll back, which makes end-of-day review far easier than reconstructing a session from push notifications.
Running both works well: tight thresholds on push, looser ones on Discord. Push interrupts you, so reserve it for signals that earn an interruption. Discord accumulates quietly, so it can carry the wider net you review later. For how alerting fits a trading routine, see Trade Echo Alerts and Playbooks.
Dedup: Once per Session, Plus a Cooldown
Two independent rules keep a single situation from alerting repeatedly.
First, each distinct setup alerts at most once per session. A name that qualifies at 9:45 and is still qualifying at 11:20 does not alert again. The setup did not become new information by persisting, and the tab is where you check whether something is still valid.
Second, a per-ticker cooldown applies on top of that. The default is 60 minutes and it is adjustable from 5 to 1440 minutes. This is a separate control from the once-per-session rule: the session rule stops the same setup from repeating, while the cooldown stops a single busy ticker from producing a burst of different alerts back to back.
Tune the cooldown to your holding period rather than to your patience. An intraday trader working several names may want it short, near 5 to 15 minutes, so a genuinely new development on a ticker reaches them promptly. A swing trader has no use for a second alert on the same name an hour later and should leave the default at 60 or raise it. The 1440-minute maximum is a full day, effectively one alert per ticker per session.
The 15:30 ET Cutoff
Setups that first appear in the last half hour of the session do not alert. From 15:30 ET onward, a newly qualifying setup will show on the tab but will not send you a notification.
The reasoning is honest and worth internalizing: there is no room left to work them. A setup that appears at 15:47 gives you minutes to evaluate, position, and manage before the close, which is not a workflow so much as a scramble. The cutoff removes the temptation rather than leaving it on the table.
Note the precise wording. The cutoff applies to setups first appearing in that window. Setups already on the list earlier in the session keep showing after 15:30, nothing disappears from the tab, and the scanners keep running. What stops is new alerts for newly qualifying setups. Watching into the close, you see a complete tab; you are simply not paged about late arrivals.
A Configuration That Survives Contact
- Enable one scanner first. Pick the one that matches how you already trade and leave the other four off. A single working alert teaches you more than five competing ones.
- Set its threshold from observation, not from a guess. Watch the tab for a few sessions, note what a genuinely interesting row looked like, and set the bar just under it.
- Start with your watchlist as the ticker source. Widen to all covered tickers only after the threshold has proven itself on names you know.
- Route to Discord before push. Let it accumulate for a session or two and review the log at the close, so you learn whether the bar is right without being interrupted.
- Set the cooldown to match your holding period, then adjust once you have seen real traffic.
- Add the next scanner only when the first is quiet and useful. Adding scanners while a bar is miscalibrated is how alert fatigue starts.
For Example
For example, suppose you trade anchor-based setups and want to hear about them without watching the tab. You enable alerts on Charm Setups only, restrict the setup type to the full charm stack at anchor rather than the weaker near-anchor state, and set your ticker source to all covered tickers because the entire point is to find names you were not already watching. You route to Discord, leave push off for the first week, and set the cooldown to 60 minutes.
Over that week your channel collects a handful of messages per session. You review them at the close against what the names actually did, decide the bar is roughly right, and then enable push as well. Had the channel collected forty messages a day, the fix would be to raise the bar, not to disable the alert. That distinction is most of what separates a useful alert configuration from an abandoned one. This is an illustrative walkthrough of the configuration process, not a prediction or a recommendation.
Common Mistakes
- Assuming alerts are already on. They are opt-in. If you have never configured them, silence is expected behavior rather than a fault.
- Setting one bar and expecting it everywhere. Thresholds are per signal, so configuring Noteworthy Flow does nothing to Breaking News.
- Pairing all covered tickers with permissive thresholds. That combination asks for everything and then gets it. Raise the bars before you blame the volume.
- Reading a missing repeat alert as a bug. Each distinct setup alerts once per session, and the per-ticker cooldown suppresses on top of that. A silent second hour usually means both rules working.
- Expecting alerts after 15:30 ET. Setups first appearing in the last half hour do not alert. Earlier setups keep showing on the tab, so check the tab rather than waiting for a notification into the close.
- Treating an alert as a trade instruction. It means a setup cleared a bar you set. Direction, level, size, and risk remain your decisions.
Where to Go Next
If you have not yet toured the five scanners, start with Discovery Quick Start. To set setup-type thresholds with real understanding of what each one means, read Discovery Setup Scanners, and make sure the GEX Rating is clear before you filter on setup types that depend on it. For how alerts fit into a full daily routine, see Trade Echo Alerts and Playbooks and the daily trading system. The Discovery feature page covers the module end to end.