Understanding the NYSE Buy Imbalance Alert

The 'NYSE Buy Imbalance' alert only happens near the end of the trading day. It is based on the specialist's market on close orders. If there are more people trying to buy a stock than are trying sell the stock, then we call that a "buy imbalance."

When there are more buyers than sellers, that often pushes a stock price higher. When there are more sellers than buyers, the pressure goes in the other direction. The imbalance data speaks directly to these facts. That's why we use green to show buy imbalances, and red to show sell imbalances.

Default Settings

By default, the NYSE buy imbalance alert will appear when there are more people trying to buy a stock than are trying sell the stock.

Custom Settings

For 'NYSE Buy Imbalance' alerts, you have the option to use an alert specific filter. This filter is located immediately to the right of the corresponding alert and is always optional. You can decide to leave it blank if you want to receive more alerts, or you can fill it in to restrict the number of alerts you receive.

This filter allows you to specify the quality of the alert. When you set a higher number for this filter, you are telling the alerts server to display only alerts that meet a higher quality standard, resulting in fewer alerts being shown.

When setting an alert for 'NYSE Buy Imbalance', you can filter the alerts based on the size of the imbalance. We don't filter these based on the raw number of shares in the imbalance. Instead, we look at the size of the imbalance for a stock as a percent of the total number of shares traded today for that stock.

Description Column

The description of the alert includes the size of the imbalance in shares.

Quality Column

Add the quality column to a scan using the 'NYSE Buy Imbalance' alert to see the % of the buy imbalance.