When you write down a trade you intend to take, you can have Ledger of Alpha watch the level for you — and when it trades, open the position without re-typing a thing.
Arming the alert
On the trade entry form, set the status to Planning and fill in a symbol and an entry price. An "Alert me when this level trades" box appears on the order ticket. Tick it and pick how price will get there:
- Falls to — you are buying a pullback (or selling into one).
- Rises to — you are buying a breakout (or shorting into strength).
We default to falls to for a long and rises to for a short, because that is the more common plan — but the choice is yours, and it matters: an alert set the wrong way round fires immediately, since price is already past the level.
The line under the toggle spells out the exact rule that will be armed. One plan holds one entry alert, so re-saving the trade never stacks up duplicates.
When it fires
You get a notification that names the plan rather than just the price — your direction, size, stop, target and the R you planned — so you can decide without opening anything first. It arrives wherever you have notifications turned on (the bell, email, Discord); see Notification preferences.
Open the notification and the plan opens ready to convert: the status is set to Open and everything you decided — stop, target, size, strategy, tags, checklist — carries across. Enter the price you were actually filled at and save. We never assume the fill was your planned level, because writing a price you didn't pay would misstate your cost basis and every number derived from it.
Things worth knowing
- Prices are checked on a schedule, not tick by tick. A level that is touched and left within the same few minutes can be missed. This is a journalling aid, not an execution tool — your broker is where orders belong.
- The alert fires once. It deactivates after triggering, so a level that keeps being retested doesn't flood your inbox.
- Opening or closing the plan disarms it — the entry already happened, so there is nothing left to watch. Move the trade back to Planning and an alert that never fired is re-armed automatically.
- Editing the plan updates the alert on save: change the entry price and the level moves with it.
- Deleting the trade deletes its alert. You will never get a notification about a plan that no longer exists.
- The alert also appears in your Alerts list alongside any price rules you created by hand, and can be deactivated or deleted from there.
Plans that never trigger
A plan whose level never trades simply stays a plan — nothing expires it automatically. It is worth filtering Trades to Planning now and then and clearing out levels that have gone stale, so the ones left are the ones you would still take.