I used to check my portfolio the way most people do: too often, and for no good reason.
Open the app. Nothing changed. Close it. Open it again an hour later, out of habit, not because anything happened.
That's not investing. That's an attention tax. So I built something to collect it back.
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The problem: watch everything, or watch nothing
Most people land on one of two extremes with their money.
- Watch charts all day — refresh, refresh, refresh, and let every wiggle in a stock price rent space in your head.
- Ignore it completely — close the app for months and hope nothing needed a decision in between.
Both are bad trades. The first burns your attention on noise. The second means you miss the one day something *actually* mattered.
I built the third option: a system that watches for me, and only speaks up when there's a real reason.
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How it works
It's a personal AI financial-watcher — not a trading bot, a noticing bot. Four pieces:
1. It pulls my real holdings, live — no API key.
It reads my actual portfolio straight from where I track it, using free public pricing data. No brokerage API key, no paid data feed.
2. It prices a watchlist against them, in real time.
Beyond what I own, I keep a watchlist of tickers I care about. The bot prices all of them, live, every check.
3. It runs my own rules — not a black box's.
This is the part that matters. I wrote my own investing rules ahead of time — an IPS (Investment Policy Statement): the thresholds and conditions that would actually make me want to know something. The AI doesn't decide what's "important." I already decided. It just checks the math against my rules.
4. It pings my phone through a Telegram bot I built — SignalShaulBot.
Break one of my rules, and SignalShaulBot sends me a message. Every morning it also sends a portfolio summary plus real, cited news — so I start the day informed without opening five tabs.
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The boundary I built in on purpose
Here's the part I care about most: it never buys. It never sells. I do that.
The bot has no ability to place a trade. It's read-only by design — pricing, checking rules, sending messages. Every decision still runs through me.
That boundary isn't a limitation, it's the point. I don't want an AI making financial decisions on my behalf. I want it doing the tedious watching so I can make *better* decisions, less often, with less noise in my head.
The result: no panic-scrolling, no FOMO, no checking my portfolio twenty times a day. My phone only taps me when there's an actual reason.
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Build your own (you don't need my exact setup)
You don't need a trading desk or a paid data terminal. You need four things, in this order:
Step 1 — Write your rules first, before any code.
What actually deserves a ping? A holding down 8% in a day? A watchlist stock crossing a price you've been waiting for? Write it down. This is the IPS-style checklist in the free blueprint below — fill in your tickers and your thresholds before you build anything.
Step 2 — Get free, keyless price data.
You don't need a paid API to price stocks live. Free public data sources cover most tickers well enough for a personal watcher — no card on file, no rate-limit anxiety.
Step 3 — Check your rules on a schedule, not a chart.
A simple script that runs on a timer, prices your holdings + watchlist, and compares against the rules you wrote in Step 1. If nothing breaks, it does nothing — silence is the feature.
Step 4 — Send the alert somewhere you'll actually see it.
A Telegram bot takes a handful of lines to wire up and put a message straight on your phone. No app to check, no dashboard to remember to open.
The honest boundary: at no point does this touch your brokerage account. It reads prices and sends messages. It never places an order. If you want that boundary looser, that's your call to make deliberately — not a default to slide into.
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Why this matters
The stock market doesn't reward the person watching it hardest. It rewards the person with a plan, who acts on the plan, and doesn't burn their attention on the noise in between.
An AI that watches for you — using rules *you* set, with a hard line it can't cross — turns "checking the market" from a daily anxiety loop into an occasional, useful ping.
You don't need to be glued to the charts. You need to know when something you actually decided matters just happened.
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*Want the exact checklist to write your own rules? The Alert-Bot Blueprint is free — grab it below.*
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# The Alert-Bot Blueprint
A free template for building your own "texts me when it actually matters" stock watcher — the same shape as the one in the video, sized down to fill in yourself.
Two parts: the rules checklist (write this first, before any code) and the setup outline (wire it up in an afternoon).
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Part 1 — Your Rules Checklist (fill this in)
This is your personal IPS (Investment Policy Statement) for alerts. The bot is only as good as the rules you write here — it doesn't decide what matters, you do.
### Your holdings
List what you actually own. The bot prices these live and checks them against your rules below.
Ticker | Shares (or "watch only") | Why I hold it
-------|---------------------------|----------------
| |
| |
| |
### Your watchlist
Things you don't own yet but want priced live anyway.
Ticker | What would make me buy?
-------|--------------------------
|
|
### Your alert thresholds
Pick the rules that would actually make you want a phone ping. Skip the ones that wouldn't — more rules isn't better, the right rules are.
- [ ] A holding moves more than ___% in a single day (up or down)
- [ ] A holding drops more than ___% from my cost basis
- [ ] A holding drops more than ___% from its recent high
- [ ] A watchlist ticker crosses $____ (the price I've been waiting for)
- [ ] My portfolio's total value moves more than ___% in a day
- [ ] Any position grows to more than ___% of my total portfolio (concentration risk)
- [ ] A holding has no real news explaining a big move (flag it, don't guess why)
- [ ] Other rule specific to you: _______________________
### What the bot should NEVER do
Write your own hard boundary — the line the bot cannot cross no matter what:
It never: ___________________________________(Mine: it never buys, it never sells. I do that.)
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Part 2 — Setup Outline
Once your rules are written, here's the shape of the build. No paid API required.
1. Pricing — keyless, live
Use a free public pricing source (no brokerage API key, no card on file) to pull live prices for your holdings + watchlist.
2. A rules engine — plain code, not a black box
A simple script that loads your checklist above as config (thresholds you set), pulls current prices, and compares. If nothing breaks a rule, it exits quietly. Silence is correct behavior, not a bug.
3. A schedule, not a chart
Run the check on a timer — every 15–30 minutes during market hours is plenty for a personal watcher. You are not day-trading; you're being notified.
4. A Telegram bot for delivery
Create a bot via Telegram's BotFather (free, five minutes), grab the bot token, and send a message to your own chat ID when a rule breaks. This is the part that gets it onto your phone without a dashboard to remember to check.
5. A daily brief (optional but worth it)
Once a day, send yourself a portfolio summary regardless of alerts — what you hold, what it's worth, and any real news on it. Cite the source. Don't let the AI invent headlines.
6. The hard boundary — build it in, don't bolt it on
Wherever your rules engine lives, make sure it has no code path to place an order. Read prices, check rules, send a message — full stop. If you ever want to automate execution, that's a deliberate, separate decision — not something that should be possible by accident.
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That's the whole shape: your rules, live prices, a quiet check on a timer, and a message that only shows up when it should.
Fill in Part 1 before you write a line of Part 2 — the checklist is the actual product here, the code is just plumbing.