Getting Started on ThinkorSwim for Beginners

this screen is the first screen you're going to see when you open up thinkorswim but we need to do one thing first before we really get started in learning about this platform i want you to take your little pretty eyeballs i want you to look up in the top left hand corner does it say delayed data for most people it probably will say delayed data in the top left of think or swim that's no good because that means that your stock prices are being updated 20 minutes behind everybody else so we need to fix that to fix this go to td amertrade.com log in then go to client services subscriptions and make sure you are subscribed to nasdaq realtime level 2 quotes once you are and it's free you can restart think or swim and you should see real time data in the top left hand corner if you don't just restart it again if you still don't see it leave a comment i'll try to help you out you'll also notice as we go throughout this tutorial that it is geared towards beginners that means we're not going to cover everything that this complicated platform has to offer and we're not going to go into granular detail over the things that we do cover so you're going to find that some things you might be personally interested in and i don't go into enough detail or don't cover at all that's where you're going to use this education tab right here so we're an education learning center click on how to think or swim click any of these links right here and now i can search for anything to do with thinkorswim and it's going to pull up a video tutorial explaining that section of this platform so for example we're not going to cover the marketwatch tab today but if you are interested in what that is and how you might use it you can search it here and here's a video that you can play and learn how to use the markwatch tab what it is and all that jazz so this is where you're going to go if you want more information if you didn't feel like i covered something in enough detail so let's go back to the screen we were just looking at which is the home screen you can always come back to the home screen by clicking home screen in the top right hand corner in the middle here we have a two by three grid of widgets and i absolutely hate that word but that's what they are they're little boxes of information and we can change what information is displayed in each box by hovering over it clicking this icon that looks like two arrows pointing towards each other and then there's a decent selection of things that you can have displayed in each one of these little boxes for example i go to market data go to quote i could type in a ticker and now i can see a quote of this company what you have displayed in these boxes is up to you and what you are interested in but not a lot of time is going to be spent on your home screen this is not where you do your trading or anything like that it's just to see little snippets of information on the right hand side of our home screen we have some content provided by td ameritrade so we're just going to push that to the side on the left hand side we have a side pane that is going to be there no matter where we go to the platform each one of these little boxes is customizable these are just the default gadgets they call them that you're going to find on your side pane so from top to bottom we have our balances and the buying power we have live news so i could search up a ticker click on an article and i can read an article there's trader tv where you can watch a handful of different networks and we have our watch list which i'll show you how to make a watch list here in a little bit and we have a quick chart where you can quickly see a stock chart of any ticker we want to look up these are all customizable you can hover over this pane here and you can switch the gadget for something else you can delete it you can even detach it which will bring it out into a different window when you go to switch to gadget you'll see there's a lot of different things to choose from so again your side pane is up to you on how to customize it and what you're interested in seeing so while this will follow us no matter where we go throughout the platform we can always hide it by dragging this bar to the left so like i said not a lot of time is spent on your home screen this is maybe just where you start your day or week or maybe just to see some blips of information from time to time the majority of your time is going to be spent in these tabs up here from monitor all the way over to education let's briefly cover these tabs so you can get some context going to this platform so let's start over at monitor under each tab you'll find a few sub-tabs so for monitor we have activity and positions account statement and strategy roller in activity and positions this is where you're going to see your positions all your open positions how are they performing what's your profit and loss what is your average cost per share that kind of thing you're also going to see your working filled and canceled orders we're not going to cover ruling strategies nor are we going to cover strategy roller today it's kind of an intermediate topic so this is where you go to see a snapshot of how your positions are performing because we don't have any positions open we don't see a lot of information here but we'll open some in just a minute the next sub tab under monitor is account statement this is important to review all the trades in your account over a certain time period your activity and position sub tab it's just for your open positions or maybe positions you close for the day but once you close the position you won't see it the next trading day it's gone but you will find it in your account statement where you can see all your order and trade history as well as all your profit and losses like i said we're not going to cover strategy roller the trade tab while you can trade anything in this tab for me is primarily used to trade options so if i type in a ticker really quick you'll see all these different options chains and we're going to use these in a little bit to trade options next is the analyze tab for me primarily i use this tab to analyze fundamentals of a company and also analyze the theoretical profit and loss of options strategies scan tab you can create your own scanner just scan for certain stocks using specific criteria we're not going to cover marketwatch charts tab is where i do all my charting in pretty much all my stock trades it's really convenient to do stock trades while you're looking at a stock chart in my opinion we're not covering tools and then that brings us back to education so as we go forward especially with just stock trades you're gonna notice i'm mostly flicking between charts and monitor back and forth because charts is where i enter my stock trades and monitors where i keep track of how my trades are doing and maybe close some positions the rest of the trades are pretty superfluous when it comes to trading stocks so if you're just getting warmed up to the platform just think charts and monitor because that's we're going to be spending most of your time if you use this platform the way i use it let's get this chart looking pretty the first thing we want to do is get this volume overlaid on the chart to do this go to this cog on the blue bar in the bottom right you'll see overlap volume make sure that is ticked hit apply now you see the volume is overlaid on the chart let's go back to chart settings again we have a couple more things we want to do go to the time access tab for expansion area put it to 50 or really anything greater than zero that's going to give us some room on the right hand side of our graph and lastly go to the equities tab in the bottom left make sure show extended hours and highlight extend hours are both ticked hit apply this way when we get into an intraday time frame like a five minute candlestick chart it'll be easy to identify what is extended hours training and what is normal market hours trading so right now we're looking at a daily chart and you can see this because there's a d up here on the blue bar if i click on this i can select from a handful of different time frames where the first number indicates how much time we're seeing like overall we're seeing five days worth of information for this one right here and the second number is how much each candle is worth so we're seeing five days of price information and each candle is five minutes worth of price changes so you can flick through these however you want you want the daily 184 hour and now you can see all that highlighted area is extended hours market trading go down to the five minute you can see a little bit better so the darker areas normal market hours the white areas extended market hours you can customize these time frames by going to customize list but i'm gonna let you do that on your own it's pretty intuitive to navigate through your chart hit your middle mouse wheel and select pan this is going to allow you to drag across your chart wherever you want to go if you want to zoom in hit middle mouse button again go to trend line click then drag and let go and it'll zoom in on that selection to zoom back out again hit middle mouse button do pan and double click let's go back to the daily time frame and let's zoom in on a more reasonable selection here let's add some indicators to this chart to add indicators or studies as they're called hit control plus e here we can search for basically any indicator we want for example we can add the v wap we can add some moving averages we can add macd they have everything so just search for whatever indicator you know of and are familiar with or wanting to learn and you will find it on this platform we can edit the details of each indicator by hitting the cog next to it so for example the simple moving average is a nine moving average we can change that by hitting this cog and changing the length of that moving average so maybe we want a 200 moving average just change it to 200 and perhaps we want the color to be green we can change it to green if you want hit apply and now we have our studies on the chart if we go to an intraday time frame you can see that the v wap is there where the top band is one standard deviation to the upside the bottom end is one standard deviation of the downside and we can change the colors to not look like total garbage by hitting that cog i showed you just a moment ago cool now we have our chart set up let's actually get rid of the v walk because it is pretty ugly let's do some basic stock trades now there are a million different places on this platform where you can buy and sell stock i'm just going to show you a couple because it's really all you need and it's really all i use the first way is by going to the trade tab over on the right this is going to bring up a bar where we can buy and sell the company we have typed here in this box so if you want to change what company we're buying or selling we just type in a different ticker hit enter that'll pull up that company's chart and now we're buying and selling that company if i click this drop down arrow we can change the quantity that we want to buy so for example we might buy 10. now by default this quantity is going to be 10. that means every time you come here and hit a buy order you're going to be sending off an order for 10 shares if you don't change the quantity if you want to change the default quantity go up to setup in the top right hand corner go to application settings go to order defaults change this to probably one or whatever you want it to be i would also change order quantity increments to one and then hit apply settings that way whenever you open up this bar whenever you hit trade it's going to bring up one so it's ready just to buy one share and every time you hit plus or minus here it's going to increase and decrease it by an increment of one okay so we're primarily ready to buy one share of activision right now our order type is market which means we're gonna get filled as soon as possible at the best available price and our time in force is day which means that if we don't get a fill by the end of the day this order will be canceled now one problem i don't have any money in this account but one of the coolest features thinkorswim has to offer is their on-demand feature so if you go to the top right and click on on demand what this is going to allow us to do is go back in time and simulate trading in the past so you see this calendar here we can go back to any day we go back years back to may 18th 2018. if i hit go we're back at may 18 2019 and we can simulate trading back on this day without using our actual money so let's go ahead and buy some amd all we do is hit buy market this is going to bring up an order confirmation dialog window which is basically double checking making sure you are comfortable entering this trade that you know you're doing and gives you the chance to correct anything in case you accidentally fat fingered or basically did something you didn't mean to do but we want to buy one share of activision at market to open so let's go ahead and send this off there we go we got a confirmation in the top left-hand corner that says we bought one share of activision that's 71.26 there that's one way to buy stock and we'll get to how to monitor that in a second let's go over my second favorite way to buy stock let's click on this trade tab to get rid of that bar the second way to buy stock is by right clicking the price up here at the top selecting buy this is going to bring up a little bit of a different window at the bottom but basically we just go left to right to make sure that this is what we want to do so we want to buy stock we want to buy one of them the ticker's activision we want to buy the market price and our time and forces day but let's say we don't want to buy a market price let's say we want to buy maybe a little bit lower we want to enter a limit order we can change this to limit and we can change to what price we want our order to execute at so if we want to get into the trade if activision drops down to 70 we can type in 70 here hit confirm and send and send it off now we can see our limit order on the chart itself which is really cool it helps you visualize where your order is at and you can also just drag this order around if you want it to go to a different price so if i want to set a limit order at 66 instead i just drag it down and let go hit send now that limit order automatically cancels and gets replaced by this new one at 66. if you want to cancel this order just click the x right next to it let's say we're getting bored and we don't want this limit order anymore we actually just want to make it a market order we can right click on it cancel and replace switch this to market hit confirm and send there we go we bought another share of activision so now we've purchased two shares of activision where can we monitor our positions well you probably guessed it it's over in the monitor tab make sure you're on activity and positions and here we can see our open positions we have activision we have two shares of it at an average price of 71.21 the current price of the stock how much the stock has changed for the day our profit loss open and our profit loss day now all this information is customizable if i go to this cog to the right we can add different info there's a lot to choose from so it's up to you to peruse this but i'll tell you a few my favorites are going to be profit loss year profit loss percent and then if i'm trading options i might add delta and gamma and vega and that kind of thing but we won't do that right now so if i hit ok now we have that extra information profit loss year-to-date profit loss as a percentage so this is really where you go to see how you're doing for each position as well as your portfolio as a whole because you'll be able to see your overall profit loss year to date you can see a graph of your net assets over time on your tdma or trade website when you first log in it'll be on your home screen now let's say we want to close out of our position well there's multiple ways to do it one way is we could go back here and we could just sell market we could sell our two shares but the problem with this is you have to make sure and be certain that you have the exact same quantity when you're selling here as you have open otherwise you'll it'll result in a short position so you want to be selling the same amount that you own to close your position to ensure that you're doing that the best way to close out of a position is in your monitor tab all you have to do is right click anywhere along this highlighted row where your stock is at go to create closing order sell to activision that's going to bring up a familiar window where we can edit or order but if we're just wanting to sell at the market price it's going to default to that so we can just confirm and send now we've closed out of the position but you can see when we went to close it it brought us over to the trade tab so we have to go back to the monitor tab to make sure that it was closed here you can see the quantity is zero you can see your profit loss but this will only stay here for the trading day tomorrow this will be gone and you'll only be able to find this information in the account statement here you can see your filled orders which is the two buy orders in the one cell to close order and you can see cancelled orders which is going to be our limit order when we moved it around so now that we've covered how to buy and sell stock and where you go to do that as well as monitor your positions let's go ahead and open some options trades i trade options in the trade tab so if i want to trade spy options i'll type in spy at the top left here now something to note this little red number is how you link charts to this tab so if i go over to the charts page here you can see how this automatically switched to spy and if i switch this to amd and go back to trade this automatically switched amd because there's a red one here and a red one here they are linked they're going to change together which is pretty handy especially when you're like charting some stock like if i'm charging activision and i decide i want to buy options on activision and i go back to the trade tab it's automatically pulled up the same chart i was just looking at the same stock so make sure that they share the same color if you want them to display the same stock or underlying so down here we have all the expiration dates for all the options let me go ahead and go to the 15th of june 2018 remember we're trading in the past so the expiration is 15th of june 2018. let's click on this arrow to unfurl this options chain in the middle here you can see under strike we have our different strike prices we obviously don't have very many like this is a this is too few to trade with to change how many strikes you see just change the number in this box right here so let's go ahead and change it to 12. this gives us a little bit more options to work with so in the middle we have our strikes for both calls and puts on the left we have our call options so each one of these rows is a call option on the right we have our put options each one of these rows is a put option the information that you see in these rows falls right underneath the titles here so you can see the asking price the bid price the net change and the last traded price you can change this information by clicking on layout right here and there's some default ones that you might be interested in where you can customize it and add certain information for example i could add the implied volatility of these options hit ok and now we can see the implied volatility since we're trading on on demand it's not actually showing the implied volatility it doesn't load that data if you want to buy a single leg option what you're going to do is hit the ask which means you're going to click on the asking price you can see as i hover over the asking price we see a little box that says buy that means we intend to buy this option if we want to sell this option hit the bid which means hover over the bid and click it but since we want to buy an option we're going to click the asking price now you can see we are buying a call it's a call option that's a 70 strike and you can see that the color of this row is blue that means that it is in the money we can confirm that because we can see the price of activision at 71.53 and if we're buying a 70 strike call that means we're buying in the money so let's go ahead and do that if i click on buy it's going to bring up the familiar window that we've already seen we can see the order default is 10 again so let's change that go to setup in the top right go to application settings go to order defaults go to options and change this to something more reasonable like one let's work our way left to right here so we're buying a single option buy single we're buying one option the underlying is activision our expiration date is the 15th of june 2018. and now all these can be changed right i can change the expiration date down here if i'd like the strike is 70 which i can also change the type is call which i can change to put if i'd like and we can enter a limit order now now instead of popping up here and looking at the bid ask is and trying to figure out where to put our limit order we can see the bid ask or part of it down here where 3.00 is the mid price and 305 is the natural or asking price when you see nat that means the price where you're going to get filled likely immediately we can enter market orders for options on thinkorswim which might be good if you're day trading but if you're not day trading i recommend setting a limit order that guarantees you a more better price if you do get a fill let's go ahead and set a limit order so let's set it at the natural price which is the asking price of 310 bucks or three dollars and 10 cents in premium hit confirm and send send it off you can see got filled in the top left and if we go back to our monitor tab we can see that position however it's a little bit confusing because we we don't see anything any quantity we don't see days trade price nothing it's mostly blank so what's going on here well it's hidden underneath activision if you click this arrow to the left it's going to drop down all the positions of every kind whether options or stock and you can see the details of each position so now we can see the call we own quantity one how many days till expiration the trade price the last traded price among some other information and if you want to sell this call option you can do the exact same thing in reverse where we go back here and we sell it and we can tell that we own this call option because there's a position symbol to the left so we can sell it here but again i want to make sure that i'm selling the appropriate quantity and all that jazz so i think it's personally best to close positions from the monitor tab so we're going to right click that call create closing order sell one activision call so we can set the limit order again we can set it at the natural price which in this case is a bid price because we're selling when you sell at the bid price that's when you're going to get most likely an immediate fill so once we reviewed this make sure we're happy with it which really the only thing you need to review is where you're setting your limit order you're gonna confirm and send and send it off so it got filled if i go back to the monitor tab you can see our quantity is zero and we're out of the trade so that's how you trade options you take a look at what expiration you want first you open that up so you see a drop down you change the strikes to the number of strikes you want to see and then you select which call or put option you want to buy of course you're probably interested in the greeks like delta vega gamma all that you can see that by changing the layout here where we can pop over to delta gamma theta and it's going to pop in here and we can see that information again we're on on demand so it's not showing right now what about spreads if you want to open a debit spread it's super easy just right click go over by buy a vertical so you can see all sorts of different option strategies here if i hit vertical it's gonna pull up that window where we can edit our trade so we can change the strikes of the call we buy and sell this first row is the call we're buying the second row is the call we're selling you see plus one and minus one so i can change the strikes of these and this is a debit spread you can tell because it's green if i were to change these strikes so they're opposite of each other it's going to go red which means it's a credit spread you're going to receive a credit for opening this trade so kind of recapping right now most your time again it's going to be spent between charts and monitor charting you're going to buy and sell stock either here using this trade tab or by right clicking on this stock price and selecting buy then you're going to monitor it in this tab see how things are going over time and then if you want to close it you right click on it and close it the only time you go into a different tab when you're just working with the basics is when you're trading options there you'll do it in the trade tab you search up whatever ticker you want to trade options on select an expiration date select a strike when whether or not you want to buy calls or puts and then when you're ready to buy click the asking price that'll automatically make it a buy order now if you accidentally click the bid it's no big deal because down here you can just switch from sell to buy so it's a different day and most of the previous bit of this video is already edited and i'm so sorry for how depressed i sound i will never make you sit through something like that again good god okay let's make some watch lists so you're going to make your watch list in the side pane over here and remember this follows you wherever you go throughout the platform so you can do this from any tab except for maybe education or help to see the watch list you already have click on it should say default right here probably when you first open up think or swim but there's a good plethora of default watch lists we have dow jones industrial average for example we have a lot of etfs there's a ton in here that are default you're going to find your own watch list under personal and i've already made quite a few but you won't have any there so let's go ahead and make a watch list to do that go to the bottom and click on create a watch list we're going to name it so we'll call it think or swim tutorial and here we can add whatever stocks we want you can use this for making watches by sector industry or just your favorite stocks doesn't matter let's add a few now that we've added some symbols let's go ahead and save this guy so again to get to this watch list or any of your watch list you're going to click on this drop down window go to personal this is where you're going to find all your watch lists but one problem when i click on these it only pulls it up in the small chart down here and that's not what i want i want it up in this big chart i want it to pop up every time i click on a ticker in my watch list i want it to pop up in this big chart over here well by default it's kind of tucked away the way to fix that you won't be able to see it until you click on this bar and drag it out now you see that colored number remember how we use that to link things together between tabs same deal goes here if i want this chart to reflect what i click on down here this color and that color and number have to be the same so since this is a yellow two i can switch this to a yellow two and now if i click on a ticker it's gonna pull it up so that it's not just down here in this tiny little chart once these things are so familiar that they're like the back your hand it's gonna be much easier to learn more about the platform don't overwhelm yourself stick to what you know until you know it well and then branch out thanks for watching guys i love you [Music] bye [Music] you

Channel: InTheMoney

Views: 245,217

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Keywords: ThinkorSwim Tutorial, ThinkorSwim Tutorial for beginners, how to trade options on thinkorswim

Id: iTHNYHYT4lA

Length: 23min 54sec (1434 seconds)

Published: Sun May 17 2020