On the Effect of “Stock Alerts” in an Agent-Based Model of a Financial Market

Nowadays, an increasing number of web sites allow people to directly trade stocks and several other types of investments in financial markets through the Internet. These sites offer many conveniences to the customers using the network infrastructure, sucht as “stock alerts”, winch are mechanisms that. promptly notify the customer when a certain stock reaches a threshold price value, set in advance by himself. The expected action front the stock alert user, upon receiving this notification, is to place an order to buy or sell stock shares, as the threshold price is supposedly associated with the profit the user is aiming for. The question addressed in this paper is how features like “stock alerts” affect tue overall i,eliavior of a financial market, as the number of individual stockholders grows due to the increased access to the market allowed by the Internet. Initial simulation results with an agent-based model of a financial market are presented