How To Set Up Day Trading Charts in ThinkorSwim TOS

[Music] all right what's going on traders so I went to go trade yesterday which was Friday July 7th and I started up my screen capture software right before the market opened it froze my computer and then I had to restart it you know just by turning it off coming on on the tower which is never a good thing and it did something to my thinkorswim when I did that I couldn't load the toss platform at all so I didn't do any trading and I eventually just had to get a third-party uninstaller to get everything wiped out whatever files it had corrupted when it froze to reinstall it and when I did get kinetic you know it takes away your settings so I figured I'd just go ahead and make a quick video on how I set up my charts and how I had the indicators and studies so if you guys want to customize your thinkorswim you can do that I do have my paper account pulled up on here and I just wanted to show you guys that you can get real-time data on the paper accounts so that you can actually day trade without using real money if you're trying strategies or you know you just before you get into it this is a really good way to get familiar not only with the toss platform but to get familiar with trading it in general I definitely recommend doing it I didn't do that and I lost about half of my account value in the period of several months so you can avoid that by paper trading first you just once you get any paper account go to your support chat go to live support and then you just create a new support request and you can just say hey you know I would like the live data on my paper account they'll say you need to sign some exchange agreement and then once you sign those it's all done and I'll set it up for you so to setup your charts if you're not familiar with the Topps platform which you're not going to be if you're new to it it is a little magnetic complex but there's a lot to this and there's a lot you can do with it I don't even know everything that can be done there's all kinds of stuff that can be customized but for charting obviously you want to go to your charts tab here and then on the next row down you've got two main areas you're going to use obviously your charts and then the flexible grid the flexible grid it kind of gives you a little more customization so this is what I usually flip to when I am active in a trade because I want to see multiple time frames and in the charts I just set up a four square grid to kind of keep an eye on a few stocks in the morning so we'll go ahead and start with how we do that so I click on this rectangle up here and this is going to be how you set up your grid right let's say you want to watch two dozen tickers at one time for me that's way too much but you could do that and you know you can always customize it I like to do four and then I will always link this one to the number one because that is what I would want to link my flexible grid to as well so to do that again real quick on the charting I want to link if I'm linking them to the same number whatever numbers are linked it's going to be on that ticker so for this particular grid on my for this particular quadrant of my grid I link it to the flexible grid same number so that I can see the same data here and in my trucks and then these three I don't do anything with I this is just again tickers that I'm watching generally in the morning okay so this is basically what it's going to look like and I've got some drawings on here that it did say before I'll go and get rid of those so this is generally how your chart is going to look when it first comes up now you can customize this however you want color size studies indicators the candlesticks you can use wine sharks all that stuff the first thing I'm going to show you is just kind of navigating the chart so if you're on the chart and let's say you want to zoom in you can either click and drag to zoom in to a specific area and then if you still are happy with this you can move your price taxes up and down with the mouse or if you hold down control and do the same thing you can actually raise and lower the you know the viewable area same thing with scrolling it but if I'm on the chart I can hit control and I can zoom in and out on the timeline as well if you just kind of want to go back to whatever whatever the standard aggregate time period is on here right - let's say I wanted to see five-minute chart of 5 days if I was doomed in here you just double click and it will take you back out and then again you can scroll to zoom in with the I said I use the ctrl key to scroll here and then I'll move my stuff around volume same thing can do that down here so that's just some quick shortcuts a lot of people aren't aware of how that works so and then like said the scrolling game just moves it left and right on your timeline so up here you've got your studies this is basically your chart appearance this is your time frame you can set up custom ones I'll show you in a minute and this is your basically your chart style and I've got some stuff saved in here from from my prior installation it's like this little drop-down bar I'll show you guys here let's just go ahead and get into it this is just your general settings and it does affect all of your charts so if you wanted to see something like let's say that you want to see where your orders go right you can you would click this you can uncheck that if you don't want to see orders replacing right for me doesn't matter because I'm not actually doing anything on here I do like to keep in my paper trade I use trading view to do some paper trading while I'm at work during the day I like to see the orders where they're at symbol logo you know that's this here the this toolbar right here that is my tools and I like to have it on each chart and then I'll show you how to customize that in a minute you can change your time zone here I'm in the Midwest so for me I like to see the Chicago time so that 8:30 when the market opens to me it's obviously 9:30 but I just like it on my charts to know the time if you want if you're watching multiple timeframes on the same ticker you you want to synchronize the crosshair so if I'm looking to a 5-minute up here and a you know 30 minute over here when I'm moving I'm moving the mouse around on here it'll show up on this one so that's what synchronous crosshairs you can play around these you know you can't ruin anything right if you let's say bunch of settings did all this stuff you can always go back here and hit reset and it'll put it back to the default settings so you can restart a goal so again these are just kind of your general chart settings the data box some people like the there's some other software that has it so when you move it you can kind of see your LC data whatever your price is I don't like it on top because to me kind of gets in the way sometimes they see how it's fixed right here I don't like it I don't use it but if you do then there it is alright so your price axis this is if you want to set maybe if you want to use the logarithmic scale you don't know if it is don't worry about it it'll mess up your trading basically as a price increases the distance from one price level to the next decreases so I don't use it if you're not familiar with it I don't recommend trying to to learn that on the fly left axis that just means it'll show data over on this side depending on some of the studies you set up this is where you can set your time limits right I like to have some expansion so I usually do 50 bars to the right I like to have a little bit of white space on the right edge of my chart I don't like to see my candles all the way over to the very far right so that's where you can change that in the expansion area there rollover lines and all this this is experts in Friday's for options if you don't trade options it doesn't matter quick time frames this is where you can add custom times so let's say you wanted to see just two days of five minutes time frame you can add that and then throw that up there and then it's in my drop-down so I could say okay I want to see two days five minutes all right pretty cool pretty evening depending on what you like to see you can make four-minute charts if you wanted whatever the case so you do that on the quick time frames in the appearances obviously where most of you are probably going to want to want to do something here so for your candle charts I like to have them filled you can take the wicks off you know you don't you can you can swap out which ones are filled up to you I just keep the standard red and green candle colors the volume bars I also like the color the same as the candles that correspond to it and then you can change it if you want you can make them a different color I always just keep it same as my candles and in the background I do like to change my background and I use the HSV tab which is just to you saturation value and I found a blue that I like and I use these numbers - 29 for the hue 92 saturation and the 9 for the value just kind of a dark blue color and then I turn the grid off if I could just see horizontal lines for price levels I would probably keep it on I don't like I don't like the time levels unfortunately you can't only change one it's the full grid so I just turn it off so that's what my charts look like if you see my other videos and that's what it is I'm not crazy dusting symbol logo all the time I like a cleaner chart honestly I could trade without excuse me the moving averages and all the other studies and indicators I would I really just like the look of a nice clean chart checkout price action and volume I'm not that good yet so unfortunately I do that that add some stuff so again that was the appearance to basically get this set up and then there's some stock specific stuff you can I don't know if you want to see CNBC video whatever but the one thing you want to do here you want to make sure that you want to show extended hours trading sessions and then to highlight it also so what that does is it gives you this gray area here when it's after market right so this was the close of the market on Thursday this is the open of the market on Friday so you always want to be able to see a pre market timeframe so that if the stocks making a move pre-market you want to know okay hey it closed at you know whatever Christ on Thursday and then this is the moon that it made overnight it into the pre-market dollars and again options futures and Forex I'm not trading those on here so I don't mess with any of those you can obviously look into those options same thing show the extended time frames so that's kind of the basic appearance the visuals that I set for the charts this sidebar right here right so let's say you want to see your level two under it or you want to see news you can you can keep the side or on here the tape that you have a tape I don't like the time and sales on thinkorswim so I don't use it I just use the chart only and I get rid of these sidebars and you do that up here by going to your grid and an unclick show sidebar and cell so that just gives me four clean sharks now if I want to save this chart style you go to your context menu style and then go to save style and I'm just going to call that you call one minute and if you've got studies in there as you can save them we'll do that in a minute so I hit save and then over here I can load it let's I go to this chart and I can just go to style load style default one minute boom and it's going to be the exact same setup here so I got to do is manipulate one chart when you're setting it up and then you can have as many charts as you want and you just have to apply that style to the next one and it's good to go it will not link the tickers all it's going to do is it's visually going to set it up the same as the original one now I'm just talking about this cool bar earlier I like to show it on each chart it's pretty easy to customize I like to have it just with the common drawing tools that I use and you just set that over here in your settings you can not a--not we can get five or six buttons I think and you know you just would just click add or whatever I could change this to do something else let's say I wanted to be able to do a different you know different FID weather maybe I want to do time extensions or something on here I can add change remove whatever the case you can pin it open I keep on the flexible grid I'll show you in a little bit I like to keep it pinned open on my 1-minute chart at the bottom because I have noticed that every now and again with the auto hide it it kind of it's like it won't come down right so if I'm on this chart it pops down sometimes got to go over to the other chart to pick the tool so on these I just kind of keep it the same and that's it for the appearance let's slip over to the studies so the studies I like to use my primary is vo op if you're not using the view op on your charts and you don't know what vo op is I highly recommend doing some research for me this is this is the I know there's no Holy Grail indicator but I think I put a lot of stock in view op let's just say that as it is an intraday chart trader B what plays a big big part in where I get in and out of trades and if I even want to get in or out of a trade based off of this so the settings that you want and thinkorswim they have three bands for Viwa we only care about the center band if you think about the indicators you want to put on your chart the studies you want to use you want to try to use the same things that other traders are going to use and you want to use them at the same settings because not only do you want to have your own strategy but you want to think about the context that okay what if someone who plays the flip side of my strategy what do they may be looking at what do they see right so I tend to just keep a lot of the settings what they are is the default because I want to see what other traders are see I'm looking at something and I would say that I went to two four standard deviations on my my Viwa and I'm using those bands if no one else is using that it doesn't mean no good does that make sense so you want to be using the same indicators in the same way that other traders are going to use them so we can get rid of upper and lower bands so you just uncheck show plot bubble and title I just colors up to you I generally I think I tend to use a some sort of blue like a lighter blue and I just like to use it as a dashed line okay hit apply and there you see a pop up on the chart so for me view up is kind of my bias I use it as an anchor really the stocks trading above B WAP it's bullish if it's trading below its barest right and you can use V WAP as an entry it's like a magnet pricing is always going to come back to view up up or down so again research that if you're not familiar with it I also like to use on my intraday charts a couple of moving averages so thinkorswim they abbreviate this mov aeg so I use EMA's or exponential moving average so I use two of those I like to use the nine and I color that one kind of ugly yellow and you can if you want to change it let's say like I use the 13 on the 5-minute chart so I'll change that here and why does that turn light blue Megan I maybe yellow that does not look yellow to me oh because this one's overlay right so I like to use the nine and then the fifty come on work with me not 550 come on remember we'll just do it this way okay 50 so 9 to 5050 is orange for me okay apply that is losing averages if you up now I also include pivot points on my chart I've been using those that have actually been finding that they are very good support and resistance markers which kind of give you an idea when you should maybe take profits - thought might bounce so I'm going to throw them on here if you guys don't want to use them again you know this is all personal preference I found early on when I first got into the stock trading and I say early on it's only been like nine months or something since I first considered this but I have so many indicators right side watched so many YouTube videos and I had done research on all these websites and everybody wants the MACD and the RSI and stochastic sand and this and that the other you can have too many indicators right basically a little bit doing to me is it was paralysis by analysis right because there's no there's no perfect set of indicators for everyone you have to find what works for you I don't like a lot of noise on my charts some guys on YouTube you'll see they've got six or seven studies and they've got volume an RSI and that deccan that works for them and that's great I'm not not connect you know you got to find what works for you that's the biggest thing you for me I found the pivot points work pretty well I do like to see all the resistance levels and then I want to see all these and then I just change the colors my support lines are green I generally like to do yellow as they near my center pivot link and I generally just want to make that some sort of neutral color resistance I generally go orange and then into red god that's an ugly red it's fine the default for the pivots I don't know why it comes with dots on there instead of app Auto just go to numerical for everything and then you can set it as a line I'm sure there's some reason it's defaulted to that but I just want to see it a straight line boom so independent points are basically just previous day's resistance and support levels obviously you know this was a resistance level here so going into the next market day that's going to be a resistance prior resistance up here one point so it's pretty cool again it's not something you've got add I have found that they can be pretty helpful I do like to draw a support in resistance lines based off of the daily chart I do like to have just these four five indicators on here and then you can save those as your drawings I guess because I've already saved it but you would just go to save as new drawing set and then name it whatever you want and then you can load that on the other so if I go to yr you're not loading oh because my studies are part of my appearance I'm sorry let's go back here so style and then we go down and you'll see when changes are made they'll be a little asterisk up here and then you've got to save it so I go down to save style default one minute and I want to include the study so I could say yes I overwrite it and then I load it again style load default one minute boom now I've got Studies on my chart so I can do the same thing here style load default one minute style load default mix so now I've got the same layout on all of my charts again I linked this chart to my level two data which I like to put over here on the sidebar and I also link that to my flexible grid so let's move on to the flexible grid you go up here if I think the customized grid is set when you first set this up so when you first get into this you should see something along these lines and all that means is it's going to give you this little pop-up box so you turn it off once you're done you can turn it you can take it off that's up here on the actual little grid so customize grid and then you would if you want to add a chart up here at the top you'd add that this it deletes it if you want to add another one vertically you click this leftmost button I like to have two on the top and then one on the bottom and I use the one on the bottom as my 1-minute chart and then I'll do five minute here and then daily up here so I can see again my daily support and resistance which I typically have drawn in but I trade the one minute use the five minute for patterns and also I can see the daily trend as well because long-term trends are going to be a more accurate study too use then short-term right so you can use your internet car your 1-minute chart to get in and out of stocks and find the exact entries and stuff but you always want to look at your daily chart even if you're day trading you generally look at the daily and you want to see what is a stock been doing what's what's the trend right so square you see my other videos I took a position on square a couple of weeks ago and it's been trending up big time right well it's kind of started ranging now and I actually got bounced out on this we'll get into that in another video but you and want to say okay if this stock is trending up I can generally be bullish or I like to look for bullish plays when it starts with being bullish if it's down trending then I'm going to be a little more aggressive at taking profits on long positions so I like to see l4u so again I'll use a daily here 5-minute here and a one-minute here and I linked all these to whatever my number one symbol was on my charts tab so number one over here is square so I would then be able to see my daily and here I'll do five minutes and then here I'll do my one minute and then the set up is exactly the same as far as customizing those charts I'm just going to go ahead and load in my one-minute real quick because right I'm going to use my one minute to trade down here and then I am going to load the one-minute style and then just change my title I already have them to five minutes alright so I take the time frame but it gives me all the same indicators and everything that I've got on the what I call my four grid my four chart grid on the other tab the only thing I change here is I use the 13 13 EMA instead of the nine on the 5-minute chart everything else is the same pivot point these the 13 into 50 always use V WAP same thing on the daily I'll use different stuff I'm going to just to get them all looking the same because Hannah OCD about that I'm going to load up my default but I want to skip on a daily timeframe I don't want pivot points view op is no use to me and I don't use ena I just use simple moving averages close SMA simple moving average I use a couple of those on the daily chart I use the 50 and the 200 is a 50 and I generally make it some shade of purple and I also use the 200 200 the granddaddy call that that respect line we make it pink because real men wear pink right so this gives you an idea a how bullish or bearish is a stock right 50 is above the 200 that's that the bullish sign and the amount of separation is going to give you an even better idea of how bullish or bearish a stock is so if this thing we're to keep trending sideways in a channel for another couple of weeks to a month you'll see this gap kind of narrow just like so something I like to use I'd only just take a look at the past you'll month or show make sure that the trend is going in the direction that I want to trade five minutes again I'm looking for patterns on the 5 minute chart that I want to play and then I use the one-minute as the kind of just exactly where I want to get in and out of trade a lot of the times it's a lot to look at but again for me this has kind of been the best setup as far as when I'm in a trade so if I'm just kind of checking out what's going on again pre-market watching the action on a few different tickers I'll just take a look at it you know my 4 charts kind of have this set up something along these lines see what's going on pre market and then when market opens I can go to what you ever stopped has the action on it right I can flip that over to this punching the sim up here if it's not my first chart I'll punch it in over here and then I can get a real quick snapshot of okay hey here's my daily support and resistance as the morning develops you know there's obviously not right at the open but is the the market develops into the first hour I can see what pattern is formed here and I can look for plays or I can just jump right in and on the 1-minute chart so I find this setup to be very comprehensive for when you want to get into a trade and when you need to be quick right because a lot of the momentum plays they need to be fast so you want to have a lot of information at your fingertips without having to be jumping around and you know changing timeframes and all that stuff so flexible grid is really good for kind of your active trade if you're not trading in thinkorswim because they do have a trade pad and it's got all this jazz for your options and I don't use it again so for me it's just about charts flexible grid and then the chart tab again you customize this however you want but this is how I have my stuff set up oh yeah over here so these can be changed I like to set up I just had one scanner which is just kind of my gainers at the open or I also have a low float scanner that I like to see that'll give me stocks that are moving and I just do a standard 5 percent since the the open gain and I just see what's moving max of 10 million volumes I'll do a video on scanners if there's enough interest there's a thousand videos out there on how to put up scanners so I don't know if you guys really want to see it I can do one but I found that less is more in terms of scanners for me personally but my settings here you can you can move the stuff up and down the positioning of it you go down here and click on your settings to do so I don't care about quick quote due to that I do want some level two though so I'm going to add level two and then I'm going to link it to the first my number of my red number one which is this chart or whatever is my flexible grid whatever I punch it here it'll show a level to it obviously nothing's going on today because it's Saturday so there's nothing moving but I don't have level two on share crater because I don't want to pay for it to me this is a pretty good substitute you know you'll have to see what what you think about but then these are these are you can scale them change the size so I generally put the I put the tape from share trader in here and then I just have a couple of bars of news and it's again I want to link those to whatever ticker I'm looking at and then my watch list that is set from a scan so oh I don't have any scans on my paper account that's why nothing comes up but if I had them you know I would go up here to personal but we'll just go to lovers and losers I mean go pre market movers and if there was anything going on here obviously Saturday so there's nothing nothing moving but that basically is kind of like a live scanner and it's just a you know you can use it as a snapshot of what's going on your scans without having to go to the scan tab run you know settings in here run a scan and all that stuff so and again level two and then I have my tape here and then I keep my my broker sure trader on the left side of my screen like sure I usually just you know I'll minimize it and put it over here so I've got broker charts and I'm all set so I hope that helps you guys let me know in the comments if there's anything you can't figure out or if you're looking to do some something specific and thinkorswim again I'm not a master at this but I have figured it out pretty good I think I know my way around it pretty well so let me know in the comments what you think what you like what you don't like if you've got questions and do as always in my videos I said I really like interacting with the community I learned a lot from YouTube I'm trying to give back and help somebody else out so thanks guys see you on the next one you [Music]

Channel: TradeJourney

Views: 18,317

Keywords: 2017, STOCK, MARKET, STOCK MARKET, TECHNICAL, ANALYSIS, VWAP, STOCK TRADE, CHART, STOCK CHART, THINKORSWIM, TOS, TRADE, SHARES, DAY, DAY TRADE, SWING, WALL STREET, BULLISH, BEARISH, DAY TRADER, SURETRADER, DAS PRO, LOW FLOAT, PATTERN, CANDLESTICK, DOJI, MOVING AVERAGE, INDICATORS, SMALL ACCOUNT, MOMENTUM, INVEST, INVESTING, INVESTOR, PIPS, FOREX, RISK MANAGEMENT, MONEY, RETIREMENT, WEALTH, CHARTS, PROFIT, FINANCE, BROKER, SCALPER, EQUITY, BULL, BEAR, BUY, SELL, JUNE, FLAG, PENNANT, SHORT, LONG

Id: l1j81jcLGyw

Length: 31min 38sec (1898 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 08 2017