Stock Screens Get Real-Time

Picture yourself navigating through another choppy day in the markets, when along comes an email alert: OneHitWonder Technologies (yes, it's fictitious) has finally climbed past its 200-day moving average and is trading at 200% of its average daily volume! Now's a great time to ride along for a couple of points, you think.

To get alerts like that you used to have to subscribe to a high-end quote service or open an account with an online brokerage that catered to active traders. But a new Web site, Xigo.com, sends them to you free. Just set up a portfolio and program in the kind of alerts you want to receive for each of your stocks. Maybe you want to know when OneHitWonder's price-to-earnings ratio drops below 10,000 or when an analyst sets a new price target for the stock. You can even enter key words of your choice (such as "CEO indicted" or "alliance with Microsoft") into Xigo.com's news-search feature. And you'll get an alert whenever those words appear in an article or press release related to the company.

I know what you're thinking: Lots of Web sites and online brokerages send out alerts like these. But Xigo.com goes to the next level. Its alerts are triggered by real-time data.

Monstrous Amounts of Processing

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