Hello, options traders. My name is Cameron May, and today, we're taking
a closer look at some very nifty but possibly lesser-known customizations that are available
for trading options on the thinkorswim® platform. So let's take a look. All right, so we're going to begin by customizing
the option chain. And to do that, I'm going to head up here
to the Trade tab in the upper left of the platform. Click on that. And I've loaded Apple by default. And before we begin customizing, the very
first thing that we might need to do is just take a moment to acquaint ourselves with the
default settings. And then we'll start to customize those. So, by default, we have the traditional expirations
in white. We have the weekly expirations in yellow,
and we might have other securities see different expirations— quarterlies, for example, on
the SPX. But anything that's a nontraditional expiration
will show up in yellow. Otherwise, the traditional third Friday of
the month expiration show up in white. All right, so let's open these up. I'm going to expand the 18th of December. And by default, we'll immediately see that
we have our strikes down the middle. We have our calls on the left, we have our
puts on the right. And by default, we have four strikes displayed. We'll also notice that we have the default
column headings: Last price, Net Change, the Bid price, and the Ask price. So the very first thing that we might customize
is the number of strikes. It might not serve a trader to just see a
few strikes. We might want to look further in the money
or further out of the money. I'm going to click on Strikes, and we can
expand that six, eight, 10, 12, 14, or even show all the strikes. So if I open up all on Apple, that's going
to be quite a few. As we scroll down through that, you can see
we have the expiration option chain that's available for the 18th of December for Apple. Let's crank this back to 12—maybe a little
bit more workable number. And we see each of these columns and column
headings. Right now, let's begin to customize the column
headings. So, as we look at these, we see that the Last
X—that stands for last price— and net change both have this little triangle in the
lower right corner. That indicates that this is a customizable
column. You'll also notice that the bid price and
the ask price, Bid X and Ask X, do not have the little triangle in the lower right. That means they're not customizable. So there are a number of different ways that
we can customize these customizable columns. Number one is we go with the default layout. So right up here under the layout title, you
can see there's our Last X in Net Change. So if I click on that, we can see a menu of
potential new column displays that can be selected: Last Price, Net Change. That's the default. Theo Price and Mark, Volume and Open Interest,
Implied Volatility, Probability of Out of The Money, and Delta and so on. So for today's example, how about we just
go ahead, and we're going to head down here to the greeks: Delta, Gamma, Theta, and Vega. As I choose that, it not only customizes the
columns, it adds two new column. So whereas before, we had the last price and
net change, now we have delta, gamma, theta, and vega. So using that layout menu is one way that
the columns can be customized. Another way is to just go to the column headings
themselves. Again, as I mentioned, if there's a little
triangle or arrow in the lower right-hand corner, we can click on that column heading
and individually customize these columns. So for example, let's borrow the gamma column. I'm going to click on that. And now I get a menu, and this allows me to
choose a whole range of potential new columns that might be added. I'm going to go down to Option Theoreticals
& Greeks. And for example, how about if we switch this
over to Implied Volatility? There we go. So we can see that that column now has been
replaced from gamma, now displaying implied volatility. Now a final way that we might customize the
columns that are displayed is using the customized tool. I'm going to pop right back up here to the
layout menu, and I'm going to slide down to Customize. And this allows us to customize not only the
column headings, but the number of columns displayed. So let's select Customize. And here we can see a menu of items. How about we switch this back to gamma? So I'm just going to type in gamma, select
that, add that to our available columns in what's known as our Current Set. And we can reposition these as well. I'm going to highlight Gamma. Let's move that up to its original position
And I'm going to remove Implied Volatility. And at the same time, just for today's example,
let's also remove Vega. This will illustrate the point that not only
do we have customized column headings but the number of columns. And we can just click OK. And now you can see those columns are now
displayed delta, gamma, and theta. And finally, if we like this display we can
save this display the way that we've customized it. I'm going to come back up to Layout and select
Save As, and I can just give this a name. For today, how about we call it Custom Greeks? We'll click Save. And the next time I'm in tinkering around
with my layout, if I've gone away from this and I want to switch back to this layout,
I could just come right back up to Layout and go down and select Custom Greeks. And that will display these columns as are
currently displayed at this moment. So now let's address one issue that you may
have already anticipated. That is, if we've added a number of custom
columns, it can get very crowded very quickly. For example, let's switch back here to our
four default greeks. And let's suppose that we've decided to customize
further. We come up here to Customize, and we start
to add some columns. So how about we add some probability? Let's type in prob. We'll choose Probability In The Money and
add that. Probability Out of The Money—add that. Probability of Touching—add that. And we click OK. And you'll notice these columns are getting
crunched. There's just not enough space or real estate. So how do we expand that display space? There's actually a very easy way to do that. It's a little tool that can be overlooked. We're going to use what's known as the Filter. As of this moment, you'll see that the filter
is set to off. I'm going to select that. And you'll notice it's giving us the choice
very first to choose a side. As I check that box or side, I can now choose
to display just the calls or just the puts. Right now, it's both. How about we choose Calls? You'll see that in doing that as I click away
from that menu, we're now just displaying the call side of the option chain, and now
we have lots of space to work with to add more column headings through that customization
tool, and it's not crowded. Now if we wanted to, of course, we could switch
back. We can come back up to Sides. Let's switch that back to Both. We can even then check the box. That's fine. But we're back to this crowded display. So it may serve our purposes now to come back
up to our layout. Maybe we go back to those Custom Greeks from
the custom columns setting that we established just a minute ago. Now the next customization that we're going
to make is to the Strike column. And for a trader, they might wonder, well,
why would I want to customize the strikes? Well, for a vertical spread trader, this can
make a lot of sense and for others using multiple leg options strategies in general. There are times when we might want to place
a vertical spread. We might want that spread to be one strike
apart. Other times, it might be two or three strikes
apart. So, for example, let's say that we are selling
an out of the money call spread. Maybe we're going to sell the 125-, 130-call
spread. Well, a quick way to place that order, obviously,
is to come over to the bid price and right click on that. And we're going to put in a sell order for
a vertical spread. Now that creates a vertical spread, and this
can be customized from here. We can choose different strikes. So for example, if we change our mind, we
wanted to go to a $10-wide spread, or let's say we wanted to do the 130 and the 120. We can just use the menu—120 to 130. We can customize the quantity and so forth. But wouldn't it be nice if there were just
a quicker way to customize this strike column so that instead of going to a $5-wide spread
and then changing it to a $10, can we just display it as a $10-wide spread? Yeah, there's a way to do that. So I'm going to delete this order. And we're going to change our spread right
up here. Now as I show you this Spread function, the
very first thing I'm going to do is show you another way that we might have entered that
125-, 130-vertical spread. And then we're going to widen that to two
strikes apart, maybe go for like a 130 to 140. So I'm going to click on Spread: Single, and
I'm going to change that to Vertical. And as I do this, keep your eyes on the strike
column over here. And you'll notice that right now, it's displaying
all the individual strikes. But as I choose Vertical, it's going to pair
up one strike with the next. And now we can see potential vertical spreads. For example, there's our 125, 130. So if I wanted to enter that call spread,
I could just come over to the bid price and click on that to create a short call spread
order. And from here, of course, I could choose to
customize my strikes further, change my quantity, and so on. But for now, our vertical spread traders for
whom speed is of the essence, wouldn't it be nice if we could just skip this part where
we're customizing a prebuilt order template, and instead, I'd like to see maybe the strikes
displayed where it's giving us the option to choose a vertical spread that's two strikes
apart—for example, the 130 and 140? To do that, I'm going to head right back up
to our Spread: Vertical menu. I'm going to click on that menu heading, and
I'm going to go down to deep and wide. I'll explain what that means. As I point at deep and wide, you'll see over
to the right, we have a number of choices: one month by one strike, one month by two
strikes. And I'm going to choose one month by two strikes. So why is that? Well, let's say that we've envisioned that
130-, 140-call spread. Well, those are two strikes apart. But both of those options are still in the
same month. So one month represented by our trade but
two strikes apart. Now I'm going to slide over to the third side
menu here, and I'm going to choose vertical. And as I do that, you'll notice here under
our strike column we now have, hey, there's our 130 and 140. They're two calls, both in the same month,
but two strikes apart. So now I could just come over to the bid price
and click on that. And you'll see that my order has changed down
here. We had a 125, 130. It's now 130 by 140 skipping over that 135
strike. And I can just confirm and send the order
from here. Now the next customization I'm going to be
showing you will be addressing that question that a trader might have: How do I set up a scan to look for stocks
that have specific options criteria that can do that repeatedly, consistently? I just want to find stocks very quickly that
fit my custom options criteria. Well, that can be done using the Scan tool. I'm going to head up here to the Scan function. By default, we might find ourselves on the
Stock Hacker. But I'm going to navigate over to the Options
Hacker, and we're going to begin narrowing down the hundreds of thousands of options
that are found in the options chains across all of the optionable securities. And let's just suppose that we're setting
up this scan. Maybe we're a bullish investor. We're looking for maybe low volatility options
that might be a little less expensive. And we're looking for a near-term trade, maybe
something is going to last a few days to maybe possibly a couple of weeks. How do we create a scan for options that will
fill that sort of an outlook? Well, here on the Option Hacker, let's start
to enter some custom criteria. So by default, we're seeing delta in days
to expiration. I'm going to switch up the delta. Maybe we're going to look for Implied Volatility. That's a filter the options trader might use
when they're looking for more or less expensive options. And let's just say that we're looking for
implied volatility between zero—so, we can set that in the low end of our range here—and
the high end, we'll set that maybe at an implied volatility of 30. Now as we do that, you'll notice that the
histogram here narrows the field to show us just how many available options actually fit
those criteria. But we're still looking at 259,000 that fit
just that zero to 30 range. Next up, let's stay here with our days to
expiration. We were looking for an option that doesn't
expire tomorrow. Let's say we wanted seven days on that contract
but up to a maximum, how about again we put that maximum up to 30? So that's leaving us, boy, with quite a number. We're still seeing hundreds of thousands of
potential candidates. So I'm going to narrow this further by scanning
only in specific indices. Now notice right here where it says scan in. That's set to all optionable. I'm going to select, maybe from our public
watchlists, S&P 100—now that's narrowed us down from a couple hundred thousand to
now we're looking at around 33,000—still quite a handful. Maybe you want to narrow that further. Let's go back up to Intersect with. And for today, how about we look just for
technology stocks? So this will be describing a scenario where
an investor is looking to maybe place a bullish trade. We're looking for something short term in
that technology sector. So I'm going to go down to By industry. And we're going to narrow that down to—you
know what? Let's just go with Information Technology
and All Information Technology. So now we're looking at just a few thousand. That might sound like a lot, but when we're
talking about option chains that might contain dozens within an individual security, that's
narrowing the field significantly. Now as we attempt to narrow this field of
matches further, we might think, well, are we really only stuck with two potential options
criteria that we can select? No, actually, we can select additional filters,
is what we call them. I'm going to add a filter, and we're going
to choose Option. And the specific filter that we're going to
choose today, since we're looking for a bullish options candidate, we're going to click where
it says covered call returned by default here. And we're going to slide down to the menu
to Option type. And that will allow us to choose between calls
and puts. So I'm going to choose just Calls today. And there, as you noticed in that menu, there
were a number of other potential criteria that we might have selected. For example, maybe an investor wants to add
a requirement for Open interest. We come back up to Add filters so that we
can leave implied volatility, days to expiration, and option type as our three preselected filters,
and we're going to choose Option again. We're going to click on our menu and go down
to Open interest. We choose our open interest. We can set that to a minimum, for today, how
about we set a minimum open interest of $500? Obviously, that's going to narrow the field
down significantly. For a maximum, we're going to leave that open. But this just illustrates how a trader can
really set up a whole custom set of potential options criteria. Let's say that we're happy with this. Let's go ahead and let's display maybe 500
potential candidates and then click Scan. And this is going to list for us S&P 100 companies
with options that meet each of our criteria. And we can scroll down through these. Looks like we have Apple, we have Cisco, we
have Intel, and so on. And we can start to investigate these further. But if an investor is happy with a scan that
they've created, they can save this is what's called a scan query. So to do that, I'm going to come up here to
the second menu icon down from the top. I'm going to click on that, and I'm going
to select Save scan query. So as we do that, we just need to choose a
name. All right, so we can just call these bullish
options candidates or whatever phrase you want to use for the naming of yours. It's totally fine. I'm just going to click Save. And then at some future date, let's suppose
I've come into the Option Hacker, and I've reset this back to the default. So we're just looking at an empty pallet,
and we just want to bring in that template that we had previously created. We could just pop right back up over here
to the same menu. We're going to load that scan query. And since this was personally created by us,
we're going to choose Personal. And there it is: Bullish Option Candidates. When I select that, you can see there are
criteria. So that's a quick way that an investor might
build a custom scan that will repeat its results. They can go out and find exactly the stocks
and the options that meet these preselected criteria consistently. Now the next customization that we're going
to set up is in the Monitor tab. We sometimes get the question, how can I set
up my monitor screen so that I can see the columns and criteria that are important to
me? So as we move to this monitor page, we can
see our default columns. We see our instrument here. We have Apple, AMD, and BA, so on. We have our quantity, days, trade price, mark,
mark change, profit and loss open, profit and loss day, and buying power effect by default. But let's suppose we're an option trader. We also want to keep tabs on, let's say, our
options greeks. How can we add those to the pre-existing column
set? To customize those columns, let me first open
up Apple here. And you can see on Apple, we have a bull-put
spread, and we have a long call. Well, let's suppose that a trader would like
to isolate Apple and then follow a few custom column criteria that are special to them. Very first thing that we're going to do, let's
move Apple to a group. I'm going to right click on the symbol. We're going to select Move group, and we have
to Add a group. So I'm just going to name this—how about
we just call this Options? We're going to click OK. And you can see that now Apple has been removed
from our unallocated group, and it's positioned up here by itself. We could add others from our unallocated to
this group if we like, but I'm going to customize this Apple options group. To accomplish that customization, we're going
to move over here to our gear icon. I'm going to click on that, and we get the
pop-up menu where it shows us our current set. This is the default set: Quantity, Days, Trade
Price, Mark, and Mark Change. And in the left column are all sorts of additional
column headings that we can select. So for example, let's start to add our greeks. I'm going to type in delta. That's going to choose from the menu. It's going to narrow that menu down to just
Delta. I'm going to choose that and add that to our
existing column set. And let's do that also for maybe gamma. So let's add Gamma. Theta, let's add that. And Vega. So now you can see that we have a larger current
set. But maybe we want to change also the organization
of this set. So if I move this down, you can see by default,
we have Quantity first, then Days, Trade Price, and Mark. And that matches with Quantity, Days, Trade
Price, and Mark. So the order that's displayed here becomes
the order it's displayed here in our monitor window. So let's suppose that we want to move up our
greeks to just next to quantity. So I'm going to click on Vega, and I'm going
to move that up. We'll select Theta, move that up. Gamma, move that up, right next to— well,
let's position it right next to maybe theta. And then finally Delta—move that up next
to gamma. As a matter of fact, let's nudge delta up
a little bit further. Let's make it right next to quantity. But once we're satisfied with where we've
position that group, we can just click OK. And what we'll see now as we look up at Apple
is there is our custom headings: Quantity, Delta, Vega, Theta, and Gamma organized in
any arrangement that we prefer. And then we go on to Days, Trade Price, Mark,
Mark Change, and the rest. Also, just as importantly, it hasn't made
any changes to our other groups. So we can not only create custom groups, but
we can create custom arrangements. And obviously, at this point, you might ask,
well, how do I save this group? There's actually not a requirement to save
this function. If we just leave it as it is and we were to
shut down thinkorswim, the next time we launch thinkorswim, this is now our default display. So it's some very quick and handy potential
customizations. Now the next customization that we're going
to learn is going to address an issue that arises frequently with traders that like to
trade rapidly, and that is, how do I create custom order templates? For example, let's suppose that one's an options
trader, and they want to buy an option. But they want to have a custom template where
they sell the option if they doubled their money or they sell their option if they've
lost half that option's value. So let's go to the Trade tab. And we're just going to stay here with Apple. I'm going to go to the 18th of December for
an example trade, and let's start to build an order. Let's suppose that we're going to buy a long
call at the 120-strike, but our plan is to sell and take our profits if we've doubled
the value of that investment or if we've lost half its value. So I'm going to right click on the ask price
and enter a custom buy order with an OCO bracket. Now this is the default setting on thinkorswim,
and the OCO stands for one cancels the other. In other words, I'm going to enter two sell
orders. And once one is filled, we want the other
one canceled. So we're going to select with OCO Bracket,
and that creates this default order template. And I can see that this is by default an order
to buy 10 contracts and then to sell those, selling 10 at a limit if the price rises,
selling 10 at a stop if the price falls. Now right now, the price of this option is
trading around $4.30. I'm going to lock this order template so this
price doesn't float as price changes. The markets are still open right now as I'm
creating this video. Now by default, you'll see that thinkorswim
enters an order, a limit order to sell, if prices rise by $1 or if they drop by $1. But this does not meet what this hypothetical
trader had in mind. So what we're going to do is customize this. First thing that I'm going to do in the customization
of this order is click on the little chain link here. I'm going to click on that, and that breaks
the link. I'm going to click on the other one and break
that link. And you can see now that the template has
changed. Instead of showing $5.30 and $3.30, I now
see plus $1 and minus $1. But we want to step this up not by dollars
but by percentages. So I'm going to change that to percentage
by clicking on it twice and do the same thing for our stop. And then I'm going to change the number in
that display window. Let's change this to plus 100 and minus 50. So I'm literally just clicking in the window
and changing the values. So now we're creating an order template that
will buy the options contract at the current price at a limit price, sell if it doubles,
sell if it reduces by half. Now I'm also going to come over here and change
these orders to GTC. That stands for good until canceled. So that means the orders remain in effect
for up to six months or until the order fills or until I choose to cancel it. Finally, let's unlock this value and let that
price start to float again. Now before we submit this order, I'm going
to come down here to the save icon. It looks like a little old computer disk with
a little menu next to it. I'm going to click on that. And let's give this a name. So this is going to be our template from here
forward, and we can save this. We can come back and retrieve it very quickly. Let's just say this is for a Long Call OCO. Whatever you want to call it is fine. But I'm just going to click Save. And I'm now prepared, if we wanted to, we
could submit this order. But to make the point here, I'm going to delete
this order. And let's suppose now we roll the clock forward
three or four days. And now we have an interest in doing this
Apple transaction where we're thinking of buying the contracts and then selling if the
price happens to rise or if it happens to fall—rise by 100%, fall by 50%. To do that, I'm just going to come here to
the ask price again. I'll stay with the same strike on the same
stock. And I'm going to right click here and go to
Buy custom. But now within this menu, you'll notice, hey,
there's our long call order template. As I click on that, it creates that default
template that we've already saved. And now I could just click Confirm and Send. And before we submit this, we could quickly
read over this. Buying 10 Apple contracts with the 120-strike—right
now, the limit price is at $4.35. We're going to sell those if the price doubles
or sell if the price falls by half. And I'm going to send that order off. We'll see if we get a quick fill. Yep, we just bought those calls—bought them
for $4.30. And now we're going to go to our Monitor tab. And I can check my working orders. And we can look for those Apple calls, and
you can see right here is that Apple transaction. The order is filled, and we're going to sell
if the contract value doubles or sell if it falls by 50%. Now if you remember, that pop-up said that
we bought for $4.30. Doubling $4.30 is to sell at $8.60. If it falls by half, half of $4.30 is $2.15. So we'll sell at $2.15. So that's one quick way, an example of how
an investor might set up a custom order template and how they can save that order template. And now you can just sort of let your imagination
run wild. What are the sorts of orders that you might
construct within your own account that simplify your usage of the platform? So those are some very simple but potentially
powerful customizations for trading options on the thinkorswim platform. For more tutorials and other investor education,
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