Forex Alert Signals

December 4, 2005 9:43 PM

This pertains to Forex EUR/USD trading. Is anyone aware of a service that will alert you via email when the RSI indicator hits a certain Indicator point (RSI down crossing 30%) ?
posted by Mckoan1 to computers & internet (5 answers total)

RSI is an easy indicator to compute. You can easily get free delayed forex data and notify yourself, if you are willing to get a signal 15-20 minutes after the fact. Most forex services will sell you API access, which will grant you real time data.
posted by b1tr0t at 1:20 AM on December 5, 2005

I thought the data on sites like CNN and XE was real-time. No single exchange owns this information, do they?

You can use Excel/VBA to web query this data and generate e-mail or pop-up alerts. I've done it to prove the principle.
posted by sagwalla at 2:26 AM on December 5, 2005

Alerts like that are a common feature of many, if not all commercial trading platforms. (CQG comes to mind immediately.) What exactly are you trying to accomplish- notification when you are out-of-office? Notification via a Palm or Blackberry? Your precise needs may influence your selection far more that the generalized question you posted. Are you trading professionally? 15 minute delays are an eternity in FOREX trading.
posted by pjern at 7:09 AM on December 5, 2005

sagwalla:

No single exchange owns this information, do they?

Yes, they do. They charge Exchange Fees, for real time information (example) and usually forbid retransmission of realtime data. The traders often bitch to the exchanges if quotes are delayed over one second. That's why companies dealing in market data charge their customers the fees they do- if the information was free, market data companies couldn't exist.

Most market data company terms of service include a provision that their realtime data may not be used on any other computer or transmitted in any way across a company or personal network. This is because exchange fees are licensed per-user.

This is also why Joe Daytrader often goes down in flames- there's an information timelag- and it's waay to easy to get caught the wrong way. It's by design.
posted by pjern at 7:19 AM on December 5, 2005

I've only traded spot forex and presumed that the data on these info sites was effectively real time, as in "what is the exchange rate". I don't actually use those sites for my info; I was just curious to see if I could set up an Excel page that scraped live information, compared with alarm set-points, and sent me an e-mail if a threshold was crossed. I could.
posted by sagwalla at 10:55 AM on December 5, 2005