Hi, traders. The thinkorswim platform
is a powerful tool for futures traders. But if you're just
using the default, you're probably missing out. Today, in this video,
I'm going to show you how to customize the
thinkorswim desktop platform, so that you have all the
tools and information at your fingertips. Let's jump in. OK, the first thing I'm
going to show you how to do is set up some gadgets
in the left sidebar, so you can see relevant
information for futures traders no matter where you
are in the platform. Then, we'll get into how
to customize the Trade tab. So first I'll start
with the watch list of symbols futures traders
might want to keep an eye on. You can see I've already got a
Watchlist gadget in my sidebar. So I'll create a new
Watchlist in the gadget by clicking on the
existing Watchlist name, then Create watchlist. I'll just name it
Futures, and start to add some common Futures
symbols that we might want to trade or keep on our radar. Let's start with one of the
most actively traded products-- the S&P 500 or Ford slash ES. In thinkorswim,
all Future symbols have a slash before them. And I'll add some
other common index futures like the NASDAQ,
Dow, and Russell 2000, and a few commodities
like crude oil and gold. Let's get the VIX in there
to keep an eye on volatility. You can add as many
symbols as you'd like. We'll click Save, and
now you'll see over on the left side we
have our watch list, with some of the futures symbols
that we want to keep an eye on. You can see I've
got Live News here. I'm going to keep that but close
some of these other gadgets to make room and
add another gadget by clicking on the gadgets menu
then clicking Delete gadget. To add a gadget, I'll
click the plus sign then select one called Trade Flash. This one's super
useful for futures traders, because it allows you
to see what large investors are doing in real time. If you click on the
categories button, you can see by default it
shows all kinds of info like large equity trades or
trades on illiquid options. But I'm going to
filter it to just show large futures trades that could
potentially move the markets. So you can add any
number of gadgets here, but we'll stick
with these for now. Next, I'm going
to show you where you can see any futures
contract specifications. I'll jump over to the
Analyze tab and then the Fundamental subtab. I could just enter
a symbol in here. Well, one cool trick is that
you can link your Watchlist to the other tabs in subtabs
throughout the platform. So I'll click the Link button
and make it number one, and then set my Watchlist
here to number one, too. And now you can see
that my Analyze tab shows the details of the
products in my Watchlist. So here I've got the
contract specifications for this future's product-- Product, Multiplier, Tick
Value, Minimum Tick, Settlement, if it's optionable or
not on thinkorswim, Trading Hours, and all the
available months to trade. This is a useful reminder
of what the contract specifications are. You can also trade right
from this tab as well. Now that we've set up ways
to keep an eye on the market and get info about
contracts, we're going to head over to the
Trade tab, where you can set up different layouts for looking
at charts and placing orders. It's highly customizable,
so you can set it up to fit your specific
trading style and routines. Now, you can see there's
a Futures trader subtab and an Active Trader subtab. Their defaults are
slightly different, but they essentially
are the same thing. They allow you to create
a custom layout of gadgets with different trading tools. For the demo today, I'm just
going to use Active Trader. But remember, you can
use Futures trader to do the same things. So you can see the Active
Trader subtab is made of grids, which you fill with gadgets. By default, I've got two grids,
each with a couple of gadgets in them. You can basically add as many
grids and gadgets you like. But for this demo, I'm
going to change to one grid, by clicking the Grid button
and choosing a single grid. Now, like we did
on the Analyze tab, I'm going to link this
to my Watchlist as well. The buttons listed on the
right side of the grid are the different gadgets
I can choose from. So right now, the C for chart
and AT for Active Trader are highlighted. These are commonly used gadgets. And I'll get into more detail
about them in a minute. But first, I'm going
to go through a few of the other gadgets real
quick, so you can see what there is to choose from. First, is the
trade gadget, which provides different buttons
for placing orders. You may want that
for certain layouts, but I've already got those
buttons in the Active Trader Ladder, so I don't need it. The Buttons gadget is similar
to the Trade gadget, in that it provides buttons
for placing orders but in a different layout. Same with the Dashboard-- it provides bigger buttons
for buying and selling and includes additional
info, like tick size. Time in sales shows you
the time, price, and volume of each transaction
completed on the symbol. Chart two and chart three allow
you to add multiple charts, for example, if you wanted
to see different time frames or views of the
same symbol at once. Phase scores aren't really
relevant for futures traders, so we'll skip that. You can add Level II quotes
to see the Order book for Bid and Ask prices. And finally, there's
a live news gadget, which is the same as the one
we've got on the sidebar. So you can add and
remove and arrange these in any way you like. But you can also go to this
menu near the top of the grid to choose from some
default layouts. Let's go back to Active Trader
plus chart, a common layout. Now that we've got an
overview of how Active Trader subtab works, let's go in
depth on one particularly useful gadget-- the Active Trader Ladder,
also known as depth of market. It's a real time data table
that displays bid, ask, and volume data at
different prices. This is useful,
because it can help you get an in-depth look at the
price action in the markets. Let's break down the
different columns. The volume column
displays the number of contracts bought or
sold at every price level for the current trading day. The shade of rose
represent the number of hours during which
contracts traded at that price. For example, if there
are trades at a price on two hours of the
day, the volume bar will have two shades. If there are trades on three
hours of the day at that price, then the volume bar
will have three shades. The Buy Order column displays
your working buy orders at the corresponding
price levels. The Bid Size column
displays the current number of contracts on the bid price
at the current bid price level. You can also click on
these to place an order. Price display is
the price breakdown. Prices in this column are
listed in descending order. By default, the increment
is equal to the tick size of the contract. You can change this increment
by clicking Zoom In, Zoom Out buttons in the control bar
to the right side of the table. The current market price
is highlighted in gray. To center the
Active Trader Ladder so the market price is
exactly in the middle, click the center view button in
the control bar to the right. The Ask Size column
displays the current number of contracts on the ask price
at the current ask price. You can also click on and
ask price to place an order. The Sell Orders column displays
your working sell orders at the corresponding
price levels. You can customize columns, too. Click on the small gear
button in the top right corner of the table
and choose Customize. The Customize Active Trader
dialog box will appear. Here, you can choose
to add or remove columns or change their order. The Current Set column shows
which columns are currently visible, and the
Available Items lists what columns I can choose from. Let's suppose I wanted to see
where I had orders filled. In the Available
Items column, I'll click Fills and then
either double click it or click Add Items. I'll remove the Fills
column from my current set by double clicking it or
selecting it and clicking Remove Items. You can reorder the columns
by clicking and dragging them or selecting one
and clicking the Move Up, Move Down buttons. OK. Now that we know how to
customize the columns, let's look at how
to place trades. We already mentioned
that you can enter orders by clicking different prices
in the Bid or Ask columns. But there are also buttons
at the top of the gadget. Buy Market allows
you with one click to enter a Buy order
at the market price, whereas Sell Market
allows you to enter Sell order at the market price. If you had a working
order, you can cancel it with the Cancel button. Reverse allows you to put
in a reverse order, which means changing a long trade to
a short trade, or vise versa. For example, if I had
one long contract, the reverse button would sell
two contracts-- one to close, and one to open
a short position. And the Flatten
button allows you to close all of your positions
at once, which could be helpful if something big
happens in the market, and you're on the
wrong side of it. If we expand the
section, you can see you can set the
default quantity. If you normally trade
three contracts, you can select three so that
any time you pull up your order, it will default to three. You can also create
different order templates. For example, let's look at
first triggers with bracket. You might want to
use this order type, if after your
initial order fills, you want an OCO order or one
cancels other to automatically go to the market. You can change the brackets
just like you would from the main Order entry tab. If you always say
"go off $5", we can change your limit
to five, and we'll change your stop to two. There's also this "auto
send" button here. If you click on that, this
bypasses the order confirmation dialog box. I would be careful
in selecting that, because I think it's always
good to double check your order in the Order Confirmation box. I'm going to unselect that. You can even customize
the buttons in the gadget by clicking the big gear. It brings up a dialog
box similar to the one for customizing columns, where
you can add, remove, or reorder buttons. OK. Now, let's place an order
by clicking Buy Market. In the order
confirmation dialog box, you see your market order
with your OCO limit order at five points away, and your
Stop order at two points away. We'll click Send. We bought one
contract at 3888.25. And we have a limit order
working five points away, and a stop order working two
points away from our purchase price. Notice how on the
chart, you can also see the price
levels of our order. Here's our limit order above,
and our stop order below. You can actually
change the price level of your working order by
dragging it in this chart. If you do that, an order
entry box for that new order will appear. Now, let's look at the position
summary section of the Active Trader Ladder gadget. This is a customizable
panel that displays important details
of your current position. By default, the following
metrics are displayed-- buys and sells you've had
during the trading day-- we were already along
one ES contract, before we placed the order for
an additional one contract, we now have two-- total current position
in the account, average price of the position
currently in the account, and the profit/loss value
since the position was open, and the current
day's profit/loss. To change what data
appears in this section, click on the Actions
menu, then Customize. Here you will find all
the available items that you can add to your set. Now, the last thing
I'm going to show you is how you can
save your layouts, so you have these settings
available any time you log in. Just click the grid menu
and click Save grid as. We'll name it Futures
Trading and click Save. Then, if you ever want
to pull this same layout, just go to the grid
menu and select it. And those are just
some of the tips you can use to customize
the thinkorswim platform for futures trading. And remember, this is all
for educational purposes only and not a recommendation
for any trading strategy. We really just
scratched the surface of how you can
customize thinkorswim for your trading style. For more in-depth
thinkorswim tutorials, head to the [? Learning ?]
Center at tlc.thinkorswim.com. And don't forget to subscribe
to our YouTube channel to get notified when
we post new videos.
