TrendSpider offers support for extended hours data in price alerts of various types. In this documentation, we will overview some of these methods and how they work, as well as the various options that you will need to consider when creating alerts that take advantage of extended market hours.
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Understanding Extended Hours Support
The US stock market official trading session is open for six and a half hours per trading day which typically ranges from 09:30 AM to 04:00 PM EST, hereby referred to as NYSE trading hours in this article. In addition to the standard trading session, the US stock market is open for pre-market trading between 04:00 AM to 09:30 AM EST and the post-market session between 04:00 PM to 08:00 PM EST.
Collectively, the entire trading session during the pre-market hours or post-market hours, or both is referred to as the extended trading session.
Trading during these extended sessions is different than NYSE trading hours in many important ways as outlined below:
- The type of orders that can be placed is limited to market and limit orders
- The liquidity is often reduced, and thus the price can move in more volatile ways.
- Some brokerages do not allow customers to trade during the extended session at all, while others will charge additional fees for trading during the extended session.
The extended hours support does not apply for the assets that are tradeable 24*7 and do not have a fixed trading session window like cryptocurrencies or forex.
TrendSpider Support for Extended Sessions
TrendSpider supports creating alerts, running scans and backtests, and other functions during the extended market session. Data for the extended market session is included with your account for no additional charge. When creating an alert in TrendSpider, be it a Multi-Factor Alert or a Dynamic Price Alert, you will have to select two options related to the market session i.e. Use extended hours & Fire during.
Use Extended Hours
This option, presented as a checkbox, will allow you to tell the system whether or not to incorporate data from extended sessions while calculating indicators for the purposes of setting up your alert conditions. This does NOT mean that the system will trigger alerts during the extended hour session. Rather, it means that any indicators used in your alert criteria will be calculated with the totality of market data rather than just the data from the NYSE trading session (standard market hours.) Checking this box will change how indicators in the system are calculated and thus will change where they appear on the chart.
Fire During
This option will allow you to tell the system when to check alerts. There are four options in this menu:
Fire during Market hours: This will tell the system to only trigger the alert during the normal NYSE trading session. This means that alert conditions will ONLY be checked when the market is fully open.
Fire during Extended session: This will tell the system to monitor the alert during the totality of the entire extended trading session from 0400 Hours until 2000 Hours EST. Alerts with this criterion will trigger anytime the conditions are met, regardless of whether or not the market is officially open or in an extended session.
Fire During Pre-Market: This will tell the system to ONLY check alert conditions during the pre-market session between 0400 Hours and 0930 Hours EST. If alert conditions are met, but outside of this session, the alert will not trigger.
Fire During Post Market: This will tell the system to ONLY check alert conditions during the after-hours session between 1600 Hours EST and 2000 Hours EST. If alert conditions are met outside of this window, the alert will not trigger.
Warnings & Nuances
The TrendSpider system will provide you warnings when you create an alert that will not fire as expected automatically. These warnings may include soft warnings, where we simply give you a heads-up that something may not be right, and hard warnings, which will block your ability to proceed until the warning is resolved.
Warnings include mismatches on timeframes, for example, if you create an alert using the 45-minute timeframe that is set to trigger during the Pre Market session, there is a chance that it will not trigger correctly because there is not an even number of 45-minute candles during that session. As a result, the system will block your ability to proceed.
Additionally, there are some nuances to consider. You cannot use extended hours data or extended hour trigger criterions exclusively on timeframes greater than daily. If you attempt to create an alert using extended hours data on the weekly timeframe, the system will not allow you to proceed IF there are no lower timeframes in the alert criterion.
In other words, if the smallest timeframe condition in your alert criteria is on the Weekly or Monthly timeframe, you will not be able to create this alert. However, if you add a condition that uses a lower timeframe, then you can incorporate higher timeframe conditions into your alert and it will function as expected.
Certain types of alerts require that the chart you are creating the alert on has extended hours data enabled. For example, if you draw a trendline on an NYSE session chart (normal trading hours) and then attempt to create an alert on that trendline that incorporates or triggers during the extended hour session, the system will stop you with a hard warning. The reason for this is that the nature of extended hours price data is spotty and may result in the position of the trendline being moved when this data is incorporated. For this reason, alerts on trendlines (rays) can only be created using the same settings as the underlying chart.