Ameritrade Trade Triggers
Ameritrade has a tool called Trade Triggers. This tool will let you specify a market condition in a stock or one of the big indices. When this trigger happens you can get notified by email or have an actual order sent automatically into the market.

The tool (picture) consists of two parts, first setting up the trigger and then setting up the order. You submit it, and then confirm it and it is all set up.

The conditions that can be used are for stocks among bid price; ask price, traded volume, percent change, and others. The conditions to trigger the alert or trade for indices are fewer; value, value change, percent change, high, low.

Applications for Trade Triggers
Get an advantageous entry point; it could be useful to buy on a day when the stock market is falling 4%.

Some advanced form for stop loss, instead of stopping when the actual stock is plummeting, you could sell all your stocks when the general market is plummeting.

My Opinions
To be honest I don’t think I will be a big user of this tool. I spend a lot of time around computers so it is very easy to check stock quotes. And I am sure the media will make a big buzz and let me know if the SP 500 gains or loses 5%, so I will probably be informed, perhaps not the very second it happens, but soon enough to make any buys. It may be smart to buy when the market goes down X percent on a day, but I don’t think there is any research material the will show that you can beat the market by doing so.

As pointed out in some previous posts for the long term investor it is probably not advantageous to flip stocks. Getting alerts in the email about the movements of the stock market will possibly increase the stress and emotions involved, and possibly make you do things that are not inline with your long term plan.

As a day trading tool it is useless. The methods used by serious day traders mostly require them to constantly watch the market and put in orders accordingly.

For the investor that looks up to Buffet for his long term strategies any tools that promote the investor to look at the prices movements or promote trading for the sake of trading is bad. I think he said somewhere that he did not have a stock quote machine in his office.