What Works in Alert Services

Imagine this: A workaholic Wall Street analyst with nothing better to do Friday morning downgrades your biggest holding. You come back from holiday shopping around 5 to discover that the stock's lost 20%. Isn't that something you wanted to know while you were out spending money?

If so, you need an alert. Alerts are instant information blasts from brokers, news organizations or other services that come when, for example, there's news about or action in a stock. Alerts can tell you something as simple as when a price hits a target to something as complicated as a percentage change from the stock's average daily volume.

Alerts are fast becoming one of the most important ways sites get information to investors. At Schwab, for example, about 950,000 subscribers have signed up for at least one of its alerts (about 25% of its Web users). With the increasing ubiquity of email, the broker only expects usage to increase. ...