Why cross-asset alerts matter

Almost every stock alert tool is stocks-only. That made sense in 1995. It doesn't make sense in 2026, when half the meaningful market signals come from outside equities — Fed rates, treasuries, FX, gold, oil, crypto. Here's what changes when your alerts can stack across asset classes.

The stocks-only blind spot

Open a stock screener. Set filters. Get a list. Now ask yourself: how do you screen for "value stocks performing well in a low-rate regime"? You can't. The screener doesn't know what the 10-year yield is. It doesn't know what the dollar is doing. It doesn't know whether oil is spiking. It only knows about the stocks themselves.

That's a problem because half of what determines stock returns isn't in the stocks. It's in the macro context they're trading in.

Three things stocks-only screeners can't do

1. Regime-aware factor screens

A factor screen that works in a low-rate environment may stop working when rates spike. The screener can't adapt because it doesn't know the rate. Tickerbot can: include the rate as a condition.

2. Cross-asset divergence trades

When gold rallies but the gold miner ETF (GDX) doesn't follow, that's a divergence. Either gold is going to give back the move, or GDX is about to catch up. Either way, it's a trade — and you can't see it from a stocks-only screener because gold isn't a stock.

3. Risk regime alerts

BTC and SPY trade together as risk-on assets most of the time. When they decouple sharply, the market is making a regime call — usually a flight to either hard money or cash. You want to know the moment that happens, on any of your positions.

What "cross-asset" actually requires under the hood

The reason stocks-only screeners exist is that ingesting and storing equity data is much simpler than ingesting and storing all the other asset classes. Each asset class has its own data provider, its own update cadence, its own field names. Adding FX is a project. Adding crypto is a project. Adding macro indicators with FRED-style release schedules is a project.

Tickerbot did all those projects. Today the database has:

• Stocks — 12,000+ tickers, updated every 5 minutes
• Forex — 20 major pairs, updated every 5 minutes
• Crypto — 100 coins, updated every 5 minutes
• Commodities — gold, silver, oil, natural gas, copper, agriculture
• Treasuries — 2Y, 5Y, 10Y, 30Y yields
• Macro indicators — Fed funds, CPI, NFP, GDP, unemployment, retail sales

The compounding effect

Once you have everything in one place, you can write alerts that none of the competing tools can express. "Notify me when oil rallies 5% in a week and the energy ETF lags by more than 4 percentage points." "Notify me when the dollar index breaks 105 and any of my watchlist multinationals are within 5% of a 52-week low." These aren't exotic — they're obvious. The only reason they sound exotic is that no tool until now could express them.

The interesting alerts are the ones the existing tools can't express.