How To Build USEFUL Options Scanners On Thinkorswim

[Music] what's up guys i'm mike from stocked up in this episode we're going to go over how to make an option screener on thinkorswim so i've had this question uh asked by a lot of people recently um basically how to make an option screener on thinkorswim and i think our swim is a great trading platform i've tried a lot of different trading platforms thinkorswim is by far my favorite um the thing with thinkorswim is it's a little bit complicated uh they have so many features to the point where um it's actually a little bit complicated on how to use everything uh to its potential so uh basically in this video we're not gonna go into uh every single little thing about option screeners there's so many things that uh thinkorswim has the capability of doing but uh if we went into every single little topic um this video would be two hours long so in this video i'm going to show you how to do a basic option screener but i'm also going to give you two actually like useful screeners so um we're gonna build two screeners that i like in this video uh and that can actually be used so make sure you guys stick around and we're gonna get right into the video so uh first thing you obviously have to have think or swim um i believe you don't need any well actually you might need uh some money in your tv ameritrade account uh once you get money in your td ameritrade account you want to head over to thinkorswim and from that point you want to click on the scan tab at the top scan then you want to click option hacker okay and then your screen might look like this you have to press the down arrow so um we're going to make the first reader we're going to make is the options day trading screener so basically what i'm looking for is i'm looking for good options that can potentially be good day trades so first what i'm gonna do is i'm gonna go over to this add filter right here and i'm gonna add a couple options uh criteria right yeah so i'm gonna i'm gonna click the options filter a couple times uh just to give me some wiggle room while uh while making this so the first thing that i want to do while making this greener is i want to make sure that the underlying option that is alerted is liquid if the option is not liquid it's not even worth trading so for me personally right this is not for everyone but for me personally i like to look at only volume open interest can be great too but personally uh in this scenario i look i like to look at volume so um this screener uh how i have it uh planned out will be used within i would say the first uh 10 minutes of open so with that being said i would consider um a fully liquid option an option with over a thousand contracts traded worth of volume by the end of the day but we can't just put a thousand contracts in here because if we plan on using this at around market open no options are actually going to be alerted so i'm going to use a hundred for this example the next thing is i don't want options i i don't want to look to day trade options that expire in 100 days from now i want you know options that expire in maybe a week so what i'm going to do is i'm going to put a i'm going to put a max days to expiration of we're going to say five right so basically no actually let's go 10 so we'll do this week's expiration and next week so we'll do 10 for days to expiration uh the next thing is i want to make sure that this isn't necessarily needed but for this example i'm going to include it i want to make sure the options are out of the money uh without the money options you can get better swings for uh for day trades so i'm going to make sure we are out of the money so percentage out of the money i'm going to do minimum 0.01 all right and then for the next thing with the option is i want to make sure the option is up i'm not looking to day trade an option that's falling from 50 percent down to eighty percent i'm looking for options that are exploding that are up two hundred percent five hundred percent maybe maybe eighty percent i just want the options up so what i'm gonna do is i'm gonna click net change i'm gonna make sure it's at least one cent so by doing this it looks like we have a pretty good um pretty good setup so far now there's one oh actually there's two there's two other problems so uh the first one is i want to add one more options filter and i don't want to be day trading options that cost you know five thousand dollars each i'm looking to day trade options that might be you know five hundred to a thousand dollars each so with that being said i'm going to make sure that the last price uh where is it last price right here i'm going to make sure maximum it is let's say maximum let's go maximum let's go maximum 900 dollars in a minimum let's go five no let's go 50 for the minimum so uh now what we're going to do when we screen is we're going to see we have options that oops oh here's another thing for the screener you want to make sure that the options are selected right here not just the stock so i'll click options and now we can see that all the options in our screener tab are are up right and and this is kind of what we're aiming for the problem though is that some of these stocks actually yeah some of these stocks um you might not want to trade some of these stocks that are very low price you could say so for example you might not want to trade a 20 stock like hyln if you do want to trade that that's fine but let's say you only want to trade stocks over 50 dollars what you got to do is you have to click the stock last price make your minimum over a minimum 50 and then that should be good and then stock volume uh you don't really need this but it is useful let me go to volume i'll do like let's go a hundred thousand 100 000 right there perfect so i think this is a pretty good day trading screener uh basically what we're seeing is we are seeing uh stocks that are priced minimum 50 have stocks who are liquid the options are liquid the options expire sometime in the next two weeks the options are out of the money so it's easy to day trade all the options are up and the options aren't too expensive so from this point what you want to do is you want to have it show all of them so we can see there's 358 total i want to see all of them so let me see all of them and you could sort by percentage change so by the time the market opens um you have everything right here so if the market opens at let's say i don't know let's say the market opens and you're looking for a day trade right you can just scan this maybe five or ten minutes after market open and you're gonna see options that are liquid that are up and the stocks are liquid so in my opinion this can be a great uh day trading screener um now all you want to do is you want to go over to the top right here and you want to click save scan save scan and just save it and you'll be good to go so this is the first screener that's a day trading one it should be a pretty solid screener the next one is we are going to look over trades that you might look to sell for credit so for example let's say you don't like to long options you only like to short them i know a lot of people who are like that basically what we want is you want to plan out what you're looking for before you just go ahead and build a random screener i know for a credit spread screener i want one i want the stock to be liquid i don't want to be trading some option on some random penny stock that's not even liquid i want i want a legitimate company so the first thing i'm going to do is i'm going to do scan in i'm going to go to um i'm going to go to where is it i'm going to go to public and we are going to go to the s p 500 so let's go to s p 500 so by clicking this now we are only going to see stop we're going to see options of stocks that are in the s p 500 so with that being said all of the stocks in the s p 500 are uh do uh do fit actually actually yeah so we're gonna do an s p 500 uh we're gonna keep the last price for the scanner right there all pretty much all the stocks in the s p 500 are liquid so i'm gonna keep that and now what i want is i want volume i want liquidity for the plays that i might short i want them to be priced in this range that's good i don't necessarily care that the options are up so i'm going to delete that i do want so actually what i'm going to do is i'm going to change percentage out of the money down to probability of expiring out of the money and let's say we go 70 percent so minimum 70 and like let's say we want uh this option to expire in two weeks to let's say between 10 days and 30 days i feel like that's a good range and then of course we want them uh liquid so we'll scan right there and yeah so basically what this scanner is is if you are looking to short options uh all of the options in the screener one they're liquid two these stocks are not penny stocks they're good companies or an s p 500 um they are uh minimum price fifty dollars they're liquid they expire in 10 to 30 days the probability out of the money is 70 or higher and their last price is between the options last price between 50 and 900 dollars so basically what this screener would do is it's good to short these options because they're most likely going to expire out of the money if we look at a couple examples we have has uh 105 calls so let's look at this has 105 calls um you could see that the stock is only at 92 most likely it's going to expire out of the money the 105 calls are they're pretty far out of the money like 13 out of the money so um that's generally how it works i know this isn't a uh like we don't go over every little thing in this video uh but i feel like some some videos you see on youtube they want to go over every little little detail into building a think or swim screener but uh personally i find more value in just um you know giving you the basic rundown and then giving you a couple examples i've been building screeners on thinkorswim for quite some time now the most important thing is pretty much in any setup you want to make sure that the options are liquid and to do that you want to make sure you have good volume even if you're just trading stocks you want to make sure the stocks are liquid because if the security you're trying to trade isn't liquid then there's really no point in even trading it because it'll be hard to get in that security and out so that's the most important thing and another thing is literally just like writing down um what you're trying to find you know don't just go on think or swim and put a bunch of random variables together you want to make sure you you have a target list of stocks and then build the screener around that so i hope this video helped you guys if you guys want to see more videos like this let me know in the comments down below other than that thanks for watching

Channel: StockedUp - Mike D'Antonio

Views: 23,159

Rating: 4.9012346 out of 5

Keywords: mike dantonio, stockedup, how to build a useful options scanner, useful options screener, thinkorswim options scanner tutorial, thinkorswim options hacker tutorial, options hacker thinkorswim guide, How To Build USEFUL Options Scanners On Thinkorswim, good options scanner, good options screener, best options screener, day trading options screener, thinkorswim option hacker explained, thinnkorswim scanning for options, options trading scanner

Id: 4B8nerXR9Bs

Length: 12min 5sec (725 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 23 2020