Deal Radar: Real-Time Alerts for Stocks Announced as Going Private and How to Configure Your Watchlist

Deal Radar: Real-Time Alerts for Stocks Announced as Going Private and How to Configure Your Watchlist

Hook: Missed a take-private announcement and watched a 40% gap up before you even read the morning headlines? You’re not alone—slow alerts and noisy feeds cost traders and portfolio managers actionable returns. This guide shows how to build a Deal Radar that spots buyout announcements across exchanges in real time, filters noise, and routes high-confidence alerts to your phone, desk, or trading bot.

The problem smart investors face in 2026

Late 2025 and early 2026 saw continued momentum in take-private activity across North American and international small- and mid-cap lists. News-driven jumps (like the well‑publicized Titanium Transportation buyout) highlighted the opportunity: announcements create immediate, often outsized moves and liquidity events. But reacting requires three things many traders lack:

• Reliable low-latency event detection across exchanges and regulatory filing systems (EDGAR, SEDAR+).
• Actionable alert rules that combine news signals with price and volume filters.
• Fast delivery and integration (webhooks, bots, trade execution APIs) with deduplication and security.

Why “going private” alerts matter now

Event-driven strategies matured in 2025 with wider adoption of AI-powered news classification and faster webhook infrastructures. Institutional and retail traders alike use event-first workflows—notifications that include a headline match, confidence score, takeover premium estimate, and recommended action. In short: if you want to trade buyouts, you need more than a headline — you need a structured alert and the ability to act programmatically.

Core components of a Deal Radar

Build your Deal Radar around three pillars:

1. Source layer: real-time newswire, filings, and exchange bulletins (EDGAR/SEDAR+/LSE notices, press releases, regulated news feeds).
2. Detection & scoring layer: keyword matching, entity recognition (acquirer/target), takeover premium computation, and confidence scoring using recent 2025/26 models.
3. Delivery & action layer: webhook endpoints, Slack/Discord alerts, TradingView/TOS alerts, and execution hooks to broker APIs.

Where to source signaling data

• Regulatory filings: EDGAR (US), SEDAR+ (Canada), Companies House (UK). Automate polling and changefeeds.
• Wire services: PR Newswire, GlobeNewswire, BusinessWire, and exchange-specific news feeds.
• Market data: tick-level feeds or consolidated tapes for intraday price reaction and VWAP comparisons.
• Alternative signals: insider filings, significant shareholder disclosures, and 13D/13G changes.

Constructing actionable alert rules

Good rules combine textual signals with market context. Below are sample rules you can adapt.

Basic keyword rule (fast, low-complexity)

Trigger when a regulated press release or filing includes one of the following tokens:

• "going private"
• "take private" / "take-private"
• "tender offer"
• "going dark" (use with caution)
• "agreement to acquire" + private acquirer

High-confidence rule (recommended)

Combine keyword detection with price and ownership filters:

1. Text match: filing or wire contains keywords above.
2. Acquirer classification: acquirer is listed as private entity OR ownership increase reported (insider or affiliated investor).
3. Price move: intraday price change >= +15% within 60 minutes OR close price >= 20% over prior close.
4. Premium check: offered per-share price >= 20% above 20-day VWAP.
5. Market cap filter: optionally ignore microcaps under your risk threshold.

When all conditions pass, raise an "Event: Take-Private - High Confidence" alert. Add a confidence score (0–100) based on how many conditions matched.

Sample logical expression

IF (text MATCHES /(going private|take\s*-?private|tender offer|agreement to acquire)/i)
AND (offered_price / VWAP20 >= 1.20)
AND (intraday_pct_change >= 0.15 OR close_pct_change >= 0.20)
AND (market_cap >= 50_000_000)
THEN alert_level = HIGH

Practical examples: configuring popular platforms

The following step-by-step setups show how to implement Deal Radar alerts across common trading and monitoring tools in 2026.

TradingView (public charts + webhook)

1. Create a watchlist for target tickers or a dynamic list (e.g., all tickers priced under $5 and market cap between X and Y).
2. Write a Pine Script that monitors price change and accepts external signal flags via a text overlay or uses RSS feed input (custom integration via a server to post synthetic ticks).
3. Add alertcondition in Pine for price spikes, and connect the alert to a webhook URL.
4. Alert webhook payload (TradingView supports a configurable JSON body). Example payload:

{
  "ticker": "TTNM.TO",
  "message": "Take-private press release detected",
  "price": 2.19,
  "pct_change": 0.3861,
  "confidence": 88
}

TradingView is ideal for routing to a middle-layer (your webhook) which enriches, deduplicates, and then forwards to Slack, SMS, or execution endpoints.

Thinkorswim (TOS) and thinkScript

1. Use a TOS watchlist and create a custom thinkScript that triggers on unusual price/volume moves tied to a list of tickers flagged by your news monitor.
2. Set alerts in TOS to pop up and send emails. For webhook capability, run a small local agent (or cloud proxy) that reads the email-to-webhook or uses IMAP to poll TOS alert emails and forward structured JSON.

Interactive Brokers and API-driven execution

1. Maintain a watchlist in your middle-layer service.
2. When a high-confidence take-private alert is detected, the webhook triggers an IBKR API call (via IB Gateway or IBKR Cloud API) to place an order or send an order suggestion to the TWS app.
3. Implement safety checks: max order size, kill switches, and pre-trade risk.

Webhook integrations and best practices

Webhooks are the fastest way to push event-driven alerts into your stack. Use webhooks to:

• Deliver structured alerts to chat platforms (Slack/Discord).
• Invoke serverless functions (AWS Lambda, GCP Cloud Functions) that enrich and route signals.
• Trigger broker APIs for algorithmic responses.

Recommended webhook payload (standardized)

{
  "event_type": "take_private_announcement",
  "ticker": "TTNM.TO",
  "exchange": "TSX",
  "reported_price": 2.22,
  "prior_close": 1.58,
  "premium_pct": 0.41,
  "intraday_price": 2.19,
  "intraday_pct_change": 0.3861,
  "confidence": 92,
  "source": "GlobeNewswire",
  "filing_link": "https://example.com/filing.pdf",
  "timestamp_utc": "2026-01-18T10:23:00Z",
  "signature": "sha256=..."
}

Include a HMAC signature for authentication and a unique event_id for deduplication.

Security & reliability checklist

• Use HMAC SHA-256 signatures and rotate keys every 90 days.
• Require TLS 1.2+ for webhook endpoints.
• Implement idempotency keys (event_id) to avoid double processing.
• Backfill: store raw signals for at least 30 days for audit and reprocessing.
• Rate-limit and queue incoming webhooks to protect downstream systems.

Deduplication, throttling, and priority routing

Take-private news is cross-posted across wires and exchanges. To prevent alert storms:

• Assign a canonical event by hashing (ticker + announced_price + timestamp window).
• Aggregate duplicate feeds within a 2–5 minute window and bump confidence when multiple reputable sources match.
• Use priority routing: high-confidence alerts go to SMS/push and execution stacks; low-confidence go to a watchlist queue.

Estimating the takeover premium quickly

One of the first numbers traders want is the takeover premium. Compute it using a simple formula:

premium_pct = (offered_price - reference_price) / reference_price

Reference price choices:
- prior_close
- 20-day VWAP (preferred for smoothing)

Example (Titanium-like): offered_price CAD 2.22, prior_close CAD 1.58 → premium = 41%.

Automation recipes for event-driven trading

Two example automation flows you can implement in 2026:

Recipe A — Alert + Human-in-the-loop

1. Webhook fires to a serverless function that enriches the signal with VWAP and insider ownership data.
2. Function posts a formatted message to Slack with buttons: "Mark Reviewed", "Send Order Suggestion", "Ignore".
3. When "Send Order Suggestion" is clicked, the server sends a suggested limit order to IBKR with a recommended price and risk limits for trader approval.

Recipe B — Fully automated liquidity capture (advanced)

1. High-confidence alert triggers a microstrategy: place a small limit order at the offered price (or execute an alert-to-fill strategy) with preconfigured size and stop-loss.
2. Use tranche execution (slice into X orders) and monitor fill rate. Cancel remaining orders if official confirmation is not posted within N minutes.
3. Log all activity with an immutable event_id for compliance.

Practical checklist before you trade a take-private alert

• Confirm the source is a regulated filing or reputable wire.
• Validate offered price and acquirer identity.
• Check regulatory conditions (any shareholder required approvals or financing clauses).
• Review liquidity and market impact—low float stocks can gap violently.
• Set maximum position sizes and automatic kill-switches.

Case study: Lightweight watchlist + webhook for mid-cap take-privates

Scenario: You cover TSX mid-caps. You want to capture any take-private announcements and receive an SMS if the premium is >= 25%.

1. Source: Subscribe to a Canadian exchange news feed and SEDAR+ alerts.
2. Filter: Keyword match for "going private" or "offer to acquire".
3. Compute premium against 20-day VWAP, then compute intraday price change.
4. Rule: If premium >=25% AND intraday change >=20% THEN send SMS (Twilio) and webhook to execution proxy.
5. Outcome: You receive the SMS, verify the release, then decide to deploy capital or monitor for a tender offer.

2026 trends that affect your Deal Radar

• Faster news classification: Improved transformer models and edge inference cut detection latency in half as of 2025.
• Regulatory transparency: Enhanced filing feed APIs (EDGAR modernizations continued into 2025) make machine-readable filings easier to parse.
• Webhook standards: Adoption of HMAC signing and delivery receipts is now common practice among premium feeds.
• Event-composable platforms: In 2026, more brokerages offer direct webhook ingestion and rule engines for event-driven orders.

Troubleshooting and common pitfalls

• False positives: Press releases that mention "going private" in a discussion paragraph — mitigate with entity extraction and pattern matching for actual offers.
• Delayed market data: Don't use delayed consolidated tape when computing intraday reactions—use low-latency market data providers if milliseconds matter.
• Duplicate alerts: Use event_id hashing and a short aggregation window to collapse duplicates from multiple wires.
• Execution risk: Wet ink vs. announcement — some take-privates are subject to financing or approvals; automate conservative fail-safes.

Templates & sample code snippets

Below are two short snippets you can adapt. First, a Pine Script alertcondition snippet you can use in TradingView:

// Pine pseudo-snippet: trigger on 15% intraday move
pct = (close - open) / open
alertcondition(pct >= 0.15, title = "Intraday Jump", message = "Intraday jump detected for {{ticker}}")

Second, a simple webhook verifier (pseudo-JS) to check HMAC signatures:

const crypto = require('crypto');
function verifySignature(body, secret, signatureHeader) {
  const computed = 'sha256=' + crypto.createHmac('sha256', secret).update(body).digest('hex');
  return crypto.timingSafeEqual(Buffer.from(computed), Buffer.from(signatureHeader));
}

Actionable takeaways

• Combine keyword detection with price and VWAP filters to cut false positives.
• Use webhooks with HMAC signing and event_ids for secure, idempotent delivery.
• Prioritize alerts by confidence score and route high-confidence alerts to execution channels.
• Test two modes: human-in-the-loop vs. automated execution; keep kill-switches and risk limits in place.

"A well-designed Deal Radar catches the signal before the herd and gives you time to evaluate—fast, accurate, and actionable."

Final checklist to launch your Deal Radar this week

1. Subscribe to at least two reputable news/filings feeds for your markets.
2. Deploy a lightweight webhook endpoint with HMAC verification and idempotency keys.
3. Implement the high-confidence rule (keyword + premium + price filter).
4. Integrate with Slack/Twilio and a broker API for suggested/executed orders.
5. Backtest on a 12-month event set and tune thresholds (premium, intraday pct, market cap).

Call to action

Ready to stop missing take-private events and start acting on them? Try our Deal Radar templates and webhook starter packs on share-price.net. Get prebuilt alert rules, webhook middleware code, and platform-specific setup guides—deploy in hours, not weeks. Sign up for a 14‑day trial to access real-time feeds, example watchlists, and a library of preconfigured alert rules tailored for buyout announcements.

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