A sort of hidden Google feature – Google Alerts can be an important part of your trader’s toolbox to keep track of stock news and more. What’s up everybody? It’s Eddie Z here from EZ Trading Computers, and you’re watching Trading Computer Secrets.
If you’ve never heard of Google Alerts, I’m not really surprised. They don’t really advertise it that much, but it is one of the suite of free tools that Google offers you when you set up a Google account.
So as you can imagine, you definitely need to have a Google account, whether it’s a Gmail account or a Google account, to use this product. And it’s worthwhile to have a Google account because they do have a whole bunch of neat tools you can use.
So for example, they have YouTube, you can have a YouTube account. They have Google Drive, which is free cloud storage; it’s a very cool tool. They have a deeper version of Google Maps, Google News, Google Calendars, a place to put photos, Google+… all this stuff is free just for setting up a Google account.
But the tool we’re going to use today… I’m already signed into one of my Google accounts… The tool we’re going to use today is something called Google Alerts. And the easiest way to get there is just to go to google.com/alerts. That will take you to this page: Google Alerts.
How To Set Up Google Alerts
And so why would you set up an alert? What is an alert?
Essentially, an alert monitors the Internet for new content about a given subject. So a few reasons to set up a Google alert would be if you wanted to see what people are posting online about you or your company.
So for example, I run EZ Trading Computers, and it’s important to me to keep up with what people are saying about me online. And so every time somebody posts something online about my company, Google scans the whole Internet every day, all day long, and will report to me any pages or posts that have been put up about EZ Trading Computers.
So what we can do is actually set up an alert about EZ Trading Computers. So once you type in what topic you want the alert on, don’t click Create Alert just yet. Go ahead and click Show Options because there are a couple of really important options you want to check off here.
Set Google Alert frequency
So how often do you want the alert to show? How often do you want Google to email you an alert?
So on EZ Trading Computers, when somebody puts something up about EZ Trading Computers, I want it to happen as it happens. You can have it happen at most once a day. So you would just get a curation of all of them once a day or at most once a week. So Google will send me an email once a week with all the posts and pages that have been put up, or mentions of EZ Trading Computers, over the last week.
So we’re going to put as it happens. Now what happens… you’ll see down below is there are no recent results for my search group query. And then there’s a sample of the results I’ll get. Trader’s Podcast has a blog post about me… US Daily Review.
So there are some posts about me here and some of the types of things that will come up. So anything new that comes up online, any mentions of me, any blog posts, any news articles, any new pages that I put up, I will get an alert sent to me at my email right here.
Also, of course, you can choose what language to search in. You can search what region, by country. We’ll leave any region on.
And then how many results? Only the best results or all results. I recommend leaving it on only the best results and then what email you’d like it delivered to.
Reasons to set a Google alert
Let’s say you’re keeping track of a specific product. So one really cool product I like to keep track of is the 2016 Corvette Z06. And anytime someone writes an article about that, I want to get an email about that. And I’m going to leave it up.
Maybe I’d like to look at those once a day. So I might check off once a day. Sources automatic. You can just put news, blogs, or the whole Internet. I’m going to leave it on automatic because it’s going to search everything.
And then these are the types of things that I’m going to get… Anytime something new comes out… A new article about the Z06… So this article just came out: Lingenfelter Unveils Wide-Body Kit for the C7. Anything about the Z06, it’s going to send me an email, and I’m going to get to read the news about it.
Set Specific Stock Alerts
And so if you think about that, this would be a good place to set an alert for a specific stock.
So let’s say you have a position in Apple. I would recommend… you can put the symbol in here. Now Apple has a lot of news that comes out during the day, so you might want to set it up to only report it once a day, or you might want to set it up as it happens. Let’s put up as it happens, and you can see the types of results that will come up.
So CNBC already has some news on it, Profit Confidential has some news on it, and you can create that alert. You can also choose just Finance news regarding Apple. And if you click Create Alert, then it shows you what alerts you have. And you can change your settings to say what delivery time you want the alerts to come, or do you want to receive all the alerts in a single email, just by clicking this little settings wheel.
Google News Alerts
What’s another reason to set an alert? Another cool reason to set an alert is to keep track of news in a location where we don’t get a lot of news here in the United States. So let me give you an example.
My wife is from Ecuador and right now in Quito, Ecuador, which is the capital of Ecuador, there is a volcano that’s been extremely active, and we don’t get any news here about that. So she likes to keep up with the news since she has family there. The name of the volcano is called the Cotopaxi.
So what we can do is just type in cotopaxi. And you can already see, here’s an example of what will come, what will be coming up on a daily basis… the types of news… New Bursts of Ash and Gas Rise from Ecuador’s Cotopaxi Volcano. So news will come up.
We can change the options to be at most once a day or as it happens, and we can set all of these parameters. And then, I’m just going to choose as it happens because, unfortunately, they’re waiting for this thing to really explode. And then once I create the alert, I can go in here and set the delivery time or I can set it as a digest.
So here are my alerts. I can delete these alerts, I can edit these alerts as necessary.
Other Reasons for Alerts
So some other reasons why you would want to create a Google alert… Again, to keep an eye on a competitor, to keep an eye on your reputation, whether you’re a company, or you could even put your own name in there and see if people are posting things about you.
You can keep up with industry trends. And, of course, you can keep up with stocks and commodities as well.
So check out Google alerts. It’s a really cool tool. You’ll get email results as things appear on the web, and it’s not a very-well-advertised product. And that is how you use Google Alerts.
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My name’s Eddie Z. Thanks for watching, and I’ll see you in the next video.