How to set stock price alerts

A price alert is a notification. You name a stock and a price, and you get a push notification, email or text when the stock trades at or beyond that level. Nothing happens to your account. You still decide whether to do anything, and you still place any order yourself.

That separates an alert from a stop order, which people often mix up. The SEC's investor bulletin on stop, stop-limit and trailing stop orders describes a stop order as an order to buy or sell once a stock reaches a specified stop price, at which point it "becomes a market order." The same bulletin warns that the stop price "is not the guaranteed execution price," and that a stop-limit order, which only fills at its limit or better, "may not be executed if the stock's price moves away from the specified limit price."

So the two tools answer different questions. An alert answers "should I look at this now?" A stop or limit order answers "what should happen if I am not looking?" Many investors use both: an alert a little above a stop price, so they hear about a slide before the order is triggered.

Every large broker has alerts, but the types and the delivery differ. What follows comes from each broker's own help pages, checked in October 2026. Menu names change between app versions, so treat the paths as a guide rather than an exact script.

Robinhood

Robinhood's price alerts help page describes two kinds. Price movement alerts cover stocks, ETFs and crypto you own or watch, at a threshold of 5% (the default) or 10%; at 5% you also get the 10% alerts. You turn them on under Settings, then Notifications and messages, then Push notifications. Custom price alerts are set from the asset's chart: tap the bell, choose Price alerts, enter a price for "Price moves above" or "Price moves below," and save. Custom alerts arrive as push notifications, and price alert emails for significant moves are a separate setting under Email notifications. Robinhood also notes that it "can't always guarantee delivery of push notifications."

Public

Public's help center article on price alerts describes a movement-based system: with Price alerts on, you get a push notification when a stock or crypto in your portfolio or watchlist makes a significant move, by default more than 4.5% in either direction for stocks and more than 5% for crypto. The toggle lives under Account settings, then App preferences, then Price alerts. Setting your own threshold or a specific price target for an individual stock is listed as a Public Premium feature.

Webull

Webull's learning center lesson on alerts walks through opening a stock's details page, tapping the alert button at the bottom, entering your parameters and saving. Types include a price level, trading volume, company news, a sharp move of 3% within 5 minutes, and a new 52-week high or low. Alerts arrive as push notifications, and active ones are managed under Menu, then Shortcuts, then My Alerts.

Charles Schwab

Schwab publishes a guide to creating stock alerts in Schwab Mobile from a symbol's quote, and its app lists alerts that have triggered under Stock Alerts. On Schwab.com, Schwab's help pages point to Profile, then Alerts, then Securities Alerts, where you can track a security for price or volume changes, with delivery by email or wireless device set under Alert Settings. Schwab notes that alerts on Schwab Mobile are not synchronized with those on thinkorswim or Schwab.com.

Fidelity

Fidelity's Active Trader Pro help lists four price alert types: a price movement above or below a target, a percentage change since the previous close, a 52-week high or low, and a cross of the 20, 50 or 200 day exponential moving average. Delivery options include the Message Center, the trading platform, email and a mobile device. Fidelity says price movement and percent change alerts are removed from your active list once they trigger, while the 52-week and moving average alerts stay on until you delete them.

The pattern across all five: alerts are set one stock at a time, live inside one app, and only know about the price. None of them knows what weight a stock is meant to have in your plan, and none of them can tell you whether a move matters for your portfolio as a whole.

Walnut is an AI investing app, and its alerts are set by talking to the assistant rather than by filling in a form. The assistant turns what you say into a standing instruction, checks it on a schedule, and tells you when it fires. The full feature is described on the watches and alerts page.

1. Ask in your own words

Open the assistant and say what you want to know, for example "tell me when NVDA reaches $200" or "let me know if AAPL drops to $180." The same works from Claude or ChatGPT through the Walnut connector, because both call the same alert tools.

2. Check the confirmation

The assistant replies with your instruction restated in one line, such as "Tell me when NVDA reaches $200.00 or higher," and says how it will reach you. If it misread a ticker or a price, correct it in the same conversation.

3. Choose email or not

Alerts arrive in the Walnut notification feed and as a push notification in the app, and by email unless you ask for one without email. Turning email off does not stop the alert, it only changes where it lands.

4. Manage them on the Alerts page

Every alert you have is listed with when it last checked and when it last fired. You can pause, resume or stop any of them there, or ask the assistant. Up to 25 can be active at once.

Six kinds of alert exist in the code that runs them (lib/watches.ts), and each one maps to a plain request:

• A price above a level. "Tell me when MSFT reaches $500." Fires once, then is marked done.
• A price below a level. "Tell me if TSLA falls to $300." Also fires once.
• A daily move. Any threshold from 1% to 50%, in either direction, measured against the previous close. It can fire again on a later trading day, but only once per day.
• An earnings date. A reminder from 0 to 14 days before a company reports, defaulting to the day before. Dates come from Nasdaq's public earnings calendar, read up to three weeks ahead.
• A basket drifting from its targets. You pick how many percentage points off target counts, defaulting to 5, and the alert fires at most once a week. It needs a basket with something bought through Walnut, since there is nothing to drift otherwise.
• A scheduled recap. Daily or weekly at an hour you choose, in your time zone. It covers your portfolio value, return next to the S&P 500, the biggest movers and earnings coming up in the next seven days, so it needs connected holdings.

Each alert is checked about once an hour. Every time an alert fires is written to a log you can read, along with one line a day for checks where nothing happened, because something acting while you are not looking is only trustworthy if you can see what it did. That log is kept for 60 days.

Two things it will not do. It never fires for the past: a recap set for 11am, created at 2pm, starts the next time that hour comes round. And one event fires once: a price crossed on a given day, or a given earnings date, is reported one time however many hourly checks run afterwards.

No. An alert in Walnut can carry a prepared next step, but nothing in the code that runs alerts ever places an order. When you set an alert you can attach one of two things: an investment of a set amount into one of your baskets, or a review of a position you might trim, sell or add to. When the alert fires, the notification links you back to the assistant with that step ready, and it goes through the same preview and explicit yes as any other order.

If you approve, the order goes to your own broker. Buys you approve can be placed at Public, or at Robinhood (into a Robinhood Agentic account, while the main account stays view-only to outside apps), and also at E*Trade, tastytrade, Webull, moomoo, Questrade, Wealthsimple, Trading 212 and Stake. At other brokers, such as Fidelity, Schwab and Vanguard, Walnut reads your holdings in full but does not place trades.

The reason for the design is the delay. Walnut's alerts are checked hourly on delayed prices, so by the time one arrives the stock may have moved again. For an exact exit or entry, a stop, stop-limit or limit order at your broker is the tool built for that job, with the caveats the SEC spells out about fills. An alert is better suited to the slower question of whether the reason you own something has changed.

Robinhood is the broker people most often compare against, and its alerts are fast and free inside the app. The differences are in what can be watched and how you set it.

Robinhood figures are from its price alerts help page, checked in October 2026. Robinhood is likely the quicker of the two for a fast-moving price, since Walnut checks hourly. Walnut adds earnings reminders, basket drift and scheduled recaps to the same list, lets you phrase the alert in plain words, and works the same way whichever broker holds your account, including from Claude or ChatGPT.

They also combine. Someone holding at Robinhood can keep Robinhood's price alerts for speed and use Walnut for earnings reminders, basket drift and a weekly recap of the whole portfolio. More on using the two together is in Robinhood AI: every way to invest with AI on Robinhood.

An alert is only useful if the level means something. A few common ways people pick one:

• A valuation level. The price at which a stock would trade at a multiple you consider cheap or expensive, worked out once and then left to the alert. What is a P/E ratio? covers the arithmetic.
• A percentage from today. A drop of 10% or 20% from the current price as a prompt to re-read the reasons you own it, which is the approach in when to sell a stock.
• A chart level. A prior high, a recent low, or a moving average. How to read a stock chart explains what those lines are.
• A position size. The point at which a winner has grown into too large a share of the portfolio. In Walnut that is what a basket drift alert measures directly, as described in when should I rebalance my portfolio.

• Treating an alert as protection. An alert that arrives while you are asleep or on a plane does nothing. If a hard exit matters, it belongs in an order at the broker.
• Setting so many that none get read. Twenty alerts firing on an ordinary day teach you to swipe them away. A short list tied to real decisions gets read.
• Placing levels too close. A level a percent or two from today's price fires on ordinary noise. Daily moves of a few percent are routine for many single stocks.
• Forgetting old alerts. A target set before an earnings report or a split can stop meaning anything. Brokers like Fidelity remove price alerts once triggered; others leave them running until you delete them.
• Expecting alerts to sync. Schwab says its mobile alerts do not sync with thinkorswim or Schwab.com, so one set in one place may not exist in another.

An alert is the last step of a short chain: decide what you are watching, decide why, then let something else do the watching. Picking the names comes first, which is what how to build a watchlist with AI covers. When an earnings alert fires, how to read an earnings report is the natural next read.

Walnut is not a registered investment adviser, and its alerts describe what happened rather than telling you what to do about it. The choice of what to watch, and what to do when an alert fires, stays with you.