Signals: What's That?

Tips on using Signals

Jake Crandall avatar
Written by Jake Crandall
Updated over a week ago

What are Signals?

Signals are price or volume related events in stocks. New signals are added in real-time, triggering any notifications that have been set.

How is this different from BZ Signals in the newsfeed?

BZ Signals contains a small subset of heavily filtered signals. By using this tool, you can create custom filters and notifications to receive the signals you want.

Some examples:

Price Spikes for stocks under $5 in the Healthcare sector.

Option Activity for stocks with less than 15 million outstanding shares (low float)

Price Spikes 

Sharp moves in price & volume in under 5 minutes. Mid-day price spikes are often related to breaking news so it can be useful to turn on a voice notification so you don't miss these. Price spikes will fire at most once every 10 minutes for a given symbol. The % move that triggers a spike is based on the average trading range and price of the stock.

Option Activity - Additional fee

This signal includes two types of option activity, large blocks traded at or near the bid or ask, and option sweeps executed at or near the bid or ask.

Block Trades

Block trades are large trades. A common definition of a block trade is at least 10,000 shares or a quantity of stock having a market value of $200,000 or more, whichever is less. However, those are extremely frequent, this signal captures only large blocks that are greater than 0.0005% of market cap. The NBBO (national best bid and offer) is also captured at the time of the block.

Here are the variations of block description that you will see:

HMNY 1.2M @ $0.016 at the bid

HMNY 687,700 @ $0.018 at the ask

PDD 750,000 @ $18.50 above ask of 18.48

COTV 602,796 @ $44.68 below bid of 44.7

ZNGA 500,000 @ $4.035

Halts & Resumes

Stocks may be halted during any session, sometimes because of volatility and other times because news is pending. Know immediately when a stock is halted or resumed by using this signal. This is a good signal to turn on voice notifications for as they don't happen too often but can provide trading opportunities.

Session High & Session Low

This is a high volume signal that triggers each time a stock hits a new session high or session low.

How to use:

Mid day when the market is slow you can turn this signal on with no filters to see stocks making fresh session highs or lows. Stocks making fresh session highs or lows midday are more likely to be in-play and provide trading opportunities.

52 Week High/Low

A single 52-week high/low signal is sent for stocks hitting a fresh 52-week high or low. This signal works for pre-market, regular and after-market. A signal will be resent during the regular session even if it hit a new 52-week high or low during pre-market. A signal will also be sent after-market but only if one wasn't already sent during the regular session.

New Day High/Low Series

Day high/low series is a filtered version of the New Day High/Low signal. This can be helpful if you find the New Day High/Low signal to chatty. This filter only sends a signal out when there is at least 3 new highs or lows within 2 seconds, and will wait until no new highs/lows are reached for another second before sending the block of new highs/lows.

How to use:

This signal is helpful in identifying sharp breaks to new highs/lows instead of stocks making just one new high/low at a time. It's also useful midday to find stocks on the move.

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