Alerts: Arming Symbols and Why One Fires

An alert fires when a symbol has actually moved, not every time it ticks. What counts as a move is not a fixed number either. Helious runs the move detector on its own servers, and the move it takes to fire changes with the market. A 3bp lurch in a dead tape gets flagged. The same 3bp in a screaming payrolls session does not.

Arming symbols

Nothing is watched until you arm it. Alerts are opt-in and per-symbol, so you turn on the instruments you want and the rest of the board stays quiet. The detector tracks each armed symbol on its own, so you can sit on one tenor, a single point on the curve, through an auction or a data release without the whole board going off.

How big a move has to be

A fixed threshold is too loose in a fast market and too tight in a quiet one, so the detector calibrates against the regime instead. Regime here just means how the tape has been behaving lately. When volatility picks up the bar goes up with it, and when the tape goes still the bar comes back down. A swing worth a 1.5bp flag on a slow afternoon has to be wider than that to clear the bar when the data is flying.

So an armed symbol fires when it clears its own regime-aware threshold. The move was big enough to matter for the tape you are actually in, not big enough on a raw tick count.

When your tab is not focused

Nothing changes. Detection runs on the server and not in your browser, so an unfocused tab does not stop the watch, and neither does a machine that cannot keep up. The same move fires the same way from one session to the next.

When one fires

The cause is usually one click away. Look for a print on the [feed](/), a Fed headline, or a shift on the rates board. Ahead of a known catalyst on the calendar, arm the symbols that matter and let the detector do the watching instead of staring at one quote.