While many investors may put in a stop loss on their portfolio’s holdings, whereby if a stock moves down in price to a certain point it is automatically sold, in today’s topsy-turvy market this might not be idea.
US-based fintech firm Xignite has developed CloudAlerts, which automatically notifies its end user clients by text, email or on screen of virtually any type of market condition, for any stock, such as price movements, volume triggers and historical level breakouts. The software is available to firms who offer investing platforms to any type of investor, although seems more suited to retail investors.
First filed in December 2016 and awarded by the United States Patent and Trademark Office in March 2020, Xignite's methodology enables the massive scalability of market data-driven user alerts. Building a market alert infrastructure for large numbers of users has historically been complex and time-consuming. Not only must fintech platforms manage huge quantities of investor preferences, but they must also reliably handle the processing of millions of exception conditions occurring on massive real-time data streams.
Xignite’s technology uses an object-oriented approach particularly suited for large scale deployment in native cloud microservices. By using concepts such as message-queuing and separating the detection of market alerts from their evaluation and their processing, Xignite makes the concept of market alerts flexible and scalable.
The system already has its fans. Digital personal finance company SoFi, uses Xignite CloudAlerts in its’ free SoFi Invest consumer investing service. The service offers stocks, ETFs, and robo-advising, with no commissions or SoFi management fees.
“We have set up a rule that if any stock in a member’s holdings or watch list goes up or down 5% to send a text alert or email to the member,” said Samuel Nofzinger, Trading and Investment Manager at SoFi. “SoFi saw record investing activity last week during the coronavirus outbreak and that really tested our alerts system. Our customers value the alerts because they help them invest and protect their money better, especially in today’s volatile market.”
Dr. Qin Yu, Vice President of Engineering, said in a statement: “The challenge for any type of market alert functionality is scalability. It's easy to create market alerts on GOOG and a couple of big tech stocks, the challenge is to do it on hundreds of thousands of instruments globally for potentially millions of users. That's the problem we tried to solve and that is the technology that our patent covers."
Xignite offers CloudAlerts APIs for delayed quotes for equities, ETFs and other exchange traded instruments.
