Set & Forget: How TradeLoop's Market-Monitoring Loop Works

The Problem: You Miss the Move

Discretionary traders share one failure mode: the setup you were waiting for triggers while you're away from the desk, asleep, or watching a different name. By the time you look, the entry is gone or the stop is already hit.

The naive fix is more alerts on more platforms — a TradingView alert here, a broker push there, a phone widget. They fire as raw notifications with no context, and they can't *do* anything. TradeLoop's approach is a single background loop that watches your conditions and hands a fully-contextualized situation to your AI agent the moment one trips.

How the Loop Works

When the TradeLoop daemon starts, it spawns a background watcher. On a fixed interval it pulls fresh data for every symbol on your watchlist and evaluates the conditions you've registered:

Monitoring cycle (every N minutes):
  ├── For each watched symbol:
  │     ├── Pull latest bars (Polygon / CoinGecko)
  │     ├── Recompute indicators (RSI, MACD, MAs, ATR)
  │     └── Evaluate registered conditions:
  │           ├── RSI(14) crosses below 30  → oversold alert
  │           ├── MACD signal-line cross    → momentum alert
  │           ├── price crosses 200-day MA  → trend alert
  │           └── earnings date within 3d   → event alert
  └── On trip → assemble context packet → notify agent

Conditions are yours to set. You tell the agent in plain language — "watch AAPL, MSFT, and NVDA; alert me if any 14-day RSI drops under 30 or crosses its MACD signal line" — and it registers the rules with the loop. No rule DSL to learn.

Context, Not Just a Buzz

The difference between TradeLoop's loop and a stock alert is what arrives when it fires. A normal alert says "AAPL RSI < 30." TradeLoop assembles a packet:

{
  "symbol": "AAPL",
  "trigger": "RSI(14) crossed below 30 (now 28.4)",
  "price": 214.10,
  "macd": { "line": -1.2, "signal": -0.9, "hist": -0.3 },
  "ma200": 221.5,
  "next_earnings": "2026-05-01",
  "recent_filings": ["8-K 2026-04-22"]
}

Your agent reads that and can immediately answer "is this a dip worth buying or a falling knife?" because it has the momentum, the trend reference, the earnings proximity, and recent filings in one shot — without you assembling any of it.

Set It and Walk Away

The loop runs as part of the local daemon on 127.0.0.1. It survives across agent sessions: you set your watchlist once, close your laptop lid for lunch, and the conditions keep being evaluated when you reopen. State is persisted locally, so a restart re-arms every rule.

Recovery and Rate Limits

A monitoring loop that hammers your data provider will burn your rate limit before lunch. The watcher caches the most recent bars per symbol and only re-fetches what's gone stale for the interval you chose. If a provider call fails — transient network blip, provider 429 — the loop logs it and retries on the next cycle rather than spamming the API or silently dropping the symbol.

If a feed is persistently failing (revoked key, exhausted quota), the loop surfaces a clear message to the agent — "monitoring for AAPL paused: Polygon returned 401, check your key" — instead of leaving you to wonder why an alert never came.

When This Isn't the Right Tool

• Sub-second execution — the loop is for minute-to-hourly setups, not HFT. If you need tick-level reaction, you want a colocated execution engine, not an AI agent in the path.
• Hundreds of symbols on a tight interval — practical for a focused watchlist; if you want every S&P name checked each minute, you'll hit provider limits.

For the trader watching 10-30 names for a handful of well-defined setups, set & forget is exactly the shape of the problem.