Logging the alerts you set and chose not to act on

[Fairman]

Logging the alerts you set and chose not to act on

Many of us use price alerts at key levels to avoid staring at charts all day. When an alert fires, we look, and decide whether to trade. The trades we take go into the journal. The alerts we ignore usually go nowhere.

I started logging every alert that fired, with a short note on why I didn't act if I didn't. Then, after the session, I check what price did after each skipped alert.

There are a few reasons this helps. First, it shows whether your alerts are well placed. If most alerts fire and lead to nothing, you might be setting too many or at the wrong levels. Second, it shows whether your decision not to trade was good. If many skipped alerts would have been good trades, maybe your criteria are too strict. If they mostly would have lost, your filtering is doing its job.

Third, it gives a fuller picture of the session. Trades taken are only part of what happened. The skipped alerts show how many potential setups there were and how you responded to each.

The note doesn't need much detail. Something like spread too wide, no confirmation, against bias, or wasn't at the desk. Patterns appear over time, and some reasons for skipping turn out to be more useful than others.

[FXS HongKong Scalper]

Logging skipped alerts is a great habit. It also shows whether the decision to skip was good. If skipped alerts often led to moves that would have worked, the reasons for skipping may be too cautious. If most of them led to nothing, the skips were good decisions. A small extra column for the reason, such as spread too wide, news soon or did not like the candle, helps see which reasons were useful. Over time this can turn into a clearer rule for when to act on an alert.

[Fairman]

Alerts that fire when you're away from the desk are a separate category. Those weren't decisions to skip, they were missed. Keeping them separate from deliberate skips prevents the data from mixing two different things. Missed alerts tell you about your schedule. Deliberate skips tell you about your judgment. Missed alerts that keep happening at the same time of day might mean the alert is set for a time you're not usually available, or that your schedule needs adjusting. Moving or deleting alerts that you're never at the desk for keeps the log tidy and focused on real decisions.

[Fairman]

Checking what happened after a skipped alert should use the same rules you'd use for a real trade. Where would the stop and target have been, and which was hit first. Using hindsight to decide on a better exit for the hypothetical trade makes the skipped trades look better than they would have been. Strict rules keep the comparison fair. Writing the hypothetical stop and target at the time you skip the alert, before seeing what happens, makes it more honest. Checking afterwards with predefined levels avoids bias. A plain list with the price at the alert and the reason for skipping is enough to start.

[Fairman]

Some platforms keep a history of fired alerts, which makes this easier. MT5 has an alert log, and TradingView keeps a list. Exporting it at the end of each day saves writing each one by hand during the session. Then you only need to add the reason for skipping. Combining the alert log with your trade journal gives a complete record of what happened each session and how you reacted to every opportunity. Over time it shows how selective you really are, which is often different from how selective you think you are. Some traders discover they skip far more than they realised, others far less.

[Fairman]

Over a few months, this log can also show which levels tend to produce alerts that lead to trades and which almost never do. Levels that fire alerts repeatedly with no good trades might not be useful. Removing them reduces noise and makes the remaining alerts more meaningful when they do fire. It's a simple way to make your chart cleaner and your alerts more focused on the levels that actually produce trades. Fewer, better alerts are easier to act on calmly. Reviewing the alert list every few weeks keeps it from growing out of control as new levels are added.