How to Monitor Stock Market Prices with AI and Get Alerts on Your Phone

AI Export Lab · August 6, 2026

An AI script that monitors A-share bank stocks and Shanghai Gold prices in real time and pushes alerts to a messaging app. The same pattern works for commodity prices, exchange rates, and competitor pricing.

AI Export Lab | August 6, 2026

I check prices too often. Bank stocks, Shanghai Gold (Au99.99), a few commodity indexes. Not because I day-trade — I hold long positions — but because price swings matter for when I add to a position. And because watching a screen all day is a bad use of time.

So I built an AI monitor that does the watching for me. It runs in the background, checks prices through a free API every few minutes, and pushes an alert to my phone when something crosses a threshold. I have not manually checked a stock price in months.

The setup took one afternoon. It costs nothing to run. Here is exactly how it works.

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The Setup: What You Need

• A free stock data API. I use a Chinese market data API that provides real-time A-share and commodity prices with a free tier. Outside China, Alpha Vantage, Yahoo Finance API, or Twelve Data all offer free tiers with similar capabilities.
• A messaging app with webhook support. I use Feishu (a Chinese Slack equivalent). You can use Slack, Telegram, Discord, or push notifications through Pushover. All of them have webhook APIs — you send a POST request, you get a notification.
• A Python script. About 60 lines. The AI wrote it. It pulls prices from the API, checks them against thresholds, and fires the webhook when a threshold is crossed.
• A place to run it. Any always-on machine works. A $5 cloud server. A Raspberry Pi. Your desktop. I run mine on a cloud instance that also serves other scripts.

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How the AI Monitor Works

The script has four parts:

1. Price pull. Every 5 minutes, call the data API for each tracked symbol. Store the latest price in a small file.
2. Threshold check. Compare the current price against rules I set. Examples from my setup: A-share Industrial and Commercial Bank of China (ICBC) below ¥5.80 triggers a buy alert. Shanghai Gold above ¥600/gram triggers a "take-profit review" alert.
3. Alert generation. If a threshold is crossed, the AI generates a message that includes the symbol, current price, percentage change from yesterday, and the threshold that was triggered.
4. Push notification. The message goes through the Feishu webhook. I get a notification on my phone within seconds.

That is it. No dashboard. No real-time charting. No mobile app. I did not want those. I wanted to stop checking prices manually, not build a trading terminal.

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What I Actually Track

• A-share bank stocks. ICBC, Bank of China, Agricultural Bank, China Construction Bank. These are dividend plays. I track for buy-point opportunities.
• Shanghai Gold Au99.99. Physical gold benchmark in China. I track this for position timing.

The same script can track anything with a numeric value: exchange rates (USD/CNY matters for export businesses), commodity prices (copper, aluminum, steel — direct inputs for factory costs), competitor product prices, shipping container rates.

If it has a number that changes, the script can watch it.

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The Code: AI Writes It, You Run It

The Python script is short enough that I will describe the logic rather than paste 60 lines:

• import requests for API calls and webhook POSTs
• A config.json with symbols, thresholds, webhook URL, check interval
• A loop that runs every N seconds: fetch price, compare, send alert if needed, sleep

When I wanted this, I described the requirements to Claude — "watch these symbols, check every 5 minutes, push to this webhook when these thresholds are crossed" — and it generated the script in 30 seconds. I changed the symbols and webhook URL in the config file and ran it. It worked on the first try.

This pattern — describe requirements in plain English, get a working script, edit a config file — is the same pattern I use for PDF processing, email automation, and translation workflows. Once you learn it once, every monitoring problem becomes a 30-minute task.

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For Exporters: Monitor What Matters

If you run a B2B export business, price monitoring applies directly:

• Exchange rates. USD/CNY moves 1% and your margin changes. Set an alert at a rate that makes your pricing unsustainable. React before it eats your profit.
• Raw material prices. Aluminum, copper, steel. When the price spikes, your factory costs will follow in 2–4 weeks. An alert gives you lead time to adjust quotes.
• Shipping container rates. Shanghai to Rotterdam, Shanghai to Los Angeles. A spike catches small exporters off guard every time. Automate the check.

None of this requires a Bloomberg terminal. A free API, a 60-line script, and a webhook.

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Using AI for price monitoring in your business? Especially for raw material or shipping cost tracking — I want to know what people are watching. Send me a note.