Occasionally there may be some important alerts that you want your trading algorithms to send to you that require immediate attention. One that I use frequently is daily account drawdown. Here’s how you can set up Twilio to send you a text message when your account enters a certain percentage of drawdown.
Head over to Twilio
You do need to purchase a number to text from. It costs $1/month. You can find that here.
![](https://jeremywhittaker.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/image-20.png)
You’ll now need to go to your general settings page to retrieve your live credentials.
![](https://jeremywhittaker.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/image-21.png)
The next step is to install Twilio on your operating system. I use Ubuntu this can be done with the following command
sudo pip3 install twilio
![](https://jeremywhittaker.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/image-22.png)
Great now you’re ready to code.
The first thing you want to do is write a simple Python script to test your message sending capabilities. In the below code you’ll want to change a few variables:
account_sid – Change with your Twilio information found on your account page.
Auth_token – Change with your Twilio information found on your account page.
Using the format +19998887777 change to_num to your cell
Using the format +19998887777 change from_num to your Twilio phone number
def send_sms(to_num,from_num,body_message):
import os
from twilio.rest import Client
account_sid = 'Enter your account sid here'
auth_token = 'Enter your account token here'
client = Client(account_sid, auth_token)
try:
message = client.messages.create(
to=to_num,
from_=from_num,
body=body_message
)
print(message.sid)
except Exception as e:
print(e)
if __name__ == '__main__':
send_sms(+14809999999,+17149999999,'test')
Now that we have a function that can send text messages we just need to incorporate this into our code.