Lesson 1 of 8: Downloading and Navigating thinkorswim | Getting Started with thinkorswim®

[Music] hello and welcome everyone my name is Cameron May it's 3 o'l Eastern Standard Time on a Monday afternoon and that means we're kicking off a brand new series called getting started with thinker swim if you are brand new to that thinker swim platform you're in exactly the right place we're going to be going through some of the basics today how to download thinker swim how to navigate it use a few of the tools we're even going to be placing a trade I'm looking very much forward to it I see a lot of my familiar uh friends out there great to see you all but let's get right into this the very first thing that we need to do is uh review the risk associated with investing this is important information the information here is for General informational purposes only it's not should not be considered an individual individualized recommendation or endorsement of any particular security chart pattern or investment strategy having paper money a success in your trading does not guarantee that you're going to have success with your real funds as market conditions do change and they can change rapidly and and we need to remember that investing involves risks and that includes the risk of loss all right so let's set the agenda for the day three items on the agenda the first thing and the uh the most important thing we're going to be exploring the Thinker swim platform navigation but before we can do that we need to discuss how to download download that we're then going to get into discussing thinker swim trading and investing tools and resources at a at a pretty high level this uh this webcast is budgeted for 25 minutes so we're going to be moving forward at a pretty good and we are going to be use use some tools and resources to uh you know place a trade not so much evaluate uh example strategy candidates we'll leave that for a future discussion but before we're done today download navigate use some tools and even place an example trade okay so we do have a series here in mind so if you are new to thinker swim and you want to just build your understanding of that platform gradually do put it in your calendar to join me each week 3:00 Eastern on Mondays we're going to go through a series of lessons and today is the lesson one downloading and navigating thinker swim then we're going to be moving in Greater detail into into some greater depth on some of those functions on the platform including monitor tab trade tab charts and so on okay but first of all let's talk about downloading the platform two places to download thinker swim on schwab.com or at thers swim.com now a nice thing about downloading figer swim is uh it allows you access to trading tools and resources that are intended to be complimentary to those that are already available to you on schwab.com and there is something known as a paper money version of thinker swim I'll talk about that in just a moment and and as a final heads up you do not need your own a special username and password to get into the Thinker swim platform you just use your Schwab login okay so let's talk about where to download as you as I mentioned you can download from schwab.com or thinkers swim.com but Schwab I think this is going to be the most intuitive to our audience today when you're L logged into your Schwab account just pop up here to the trade Tab and go to the uh menu under trading platforms click on thinker swim desktop that'll assist you with onscreen prompts it'll just guide you right through the process of downloading this software to your computer and then once you've downloaded that you're just going to use as I mentioned your Schwab username and password to log into the software and it's going to give you access to your to your real balances if you choose to when you first log in It'll ask you are you trying to get to your real account or your Live account or you're logging into something called paper money and what I'll be using today is that paper money platform which is a no risk platform which is fantastic when you're experimenting with a new strategy or a new tool you you can get acquainted with that um without any real skin in the game without any real risk on the table so this is what thinker swim looks like after you've downloaded that you've logged into it you're going to land on something called the home screen I'm actually not going to spend much time on the home screen today but I do want to acquaint you with the general navigation of the platform here okay so we're going to start off by going to the monitor tab that's going to be sort of our hold spot for the moment but uh the the basic navigation of this software is uh in my view pretty straightforward once you understand it the it's accomplished by using the tabs in the left column these we generically refer to these as gadgets and you'll see why in just a moment but there also a row of tabs across the top of your screen okay and as you move across that top row you'll see as we hover over each one it'll give us a menu of subtabs so first is our monitor tab this is where we would come to you know review our current position positions monitor our our trades and our orders we can place trades by going to the trade Tab and that allows us to act to trade all sorts of uh derivatives and securities we can go to the analyze tab this one I'm not going to be spending much time on today we're going to be hitting on just a few highlights addressing some of the broadest questions that I encounter with with new users of thinker swim are going to be leaving other more I don't know if you want to call them more sophisticated but deeper tools for a later discussion where we can give specific emphasis to those but on the analyze tab this is this is uh constructed primarily for options traders who are balancing maybe a complicated portfolio of options trades a lot of great things here however we can also do fundamental analysis of companies look at look up economic data we can even look at an earnings calendar okay our scan function allows us to look for stocks that are important to us or even opt options uh potential trade candidates that are important to us using something known as the stock ha hacker or the options hacker the the spread hacker but that is a search or screen tool okay then we have the market watch Tab and this market watch tab is really just for uh keeping an eye on broader developments outside the scope of our portfolio so instead of just looking at our individual positions we might be looking at things like upcoming events on a calendar can we can look at uh the visualized tool which looks at different sectors we can set alerts for uh notifications on new developments on individual Securities or sectors and we can look at Broad quote data and uh and other um individual potential investment characteristics or or uh metrics that might be important to us what we will spend a little bit more time on today are the charts so I'll come back to that but in addition to that we also have tools education and help the tools uh allow us to um log create a a log of notes and things that are important to us we can watch videos which is actually live streaming television videos um and we can also look at uh shared items when when another YouTube or pardon me when another um thinker swim user shares information with us we can find that here all of that's interesting but the education tab is something I want to highlight right now as I hover over that education tab you're going to see two items in the drop down menu we have education and then Learning Center and they sound like almost the same thing well this is the way that I think about the the division between these two resources that are very helpful to these users of thinker swim education is where we might go and we want to learn broad things about maybe market analysis or strategies The Learning Center is very specific to thinker swim so I I think this is appropriate today to start off with our first tool as a tool that is going to be helpful to you for learning more about thinker swim so to navigate to this you just log into thinker swim software go right up to education go to Learning Center and the one resource I wanted to point out for you today is something called how to thinker swim because I'm going to try to jam in as much as I can in this discussion today what I would hope you're not doing is trying to catch everything I mentioned remember every single click that's too much pressure right we just want to get generally acquainted with the broader navigation use a few of the basic functions and get get uh moving forward along our own personal learning curve but this resource right here I think will be fabulous for you so do make a mental note of that how to thinker swim that's found right there on that uh on that Learning Center and then finally of course if you're trying to learn something if you're struggling with how to use thinker swim and you need some help in real time you can get help right here contact us okay but let's uh let's start to use some of the tools here that's the general navigation first thing that I want to point out is right up here at the top you can navigate among the different um accounts within your portfolio if you have a number of household accounts maybe you have a margin account maybe you have an IRA account you have other types of accounts uh that have been household it you can you can see them all together or look at them individually okay so for example let's say I wanted to monitor the progress of my IRA right now what we're seeing on my monitor tab is uh all of the positions across the spectrum of all of the accounts that I have if I want to look at the individual positions within the IRA click at that menu up at the top and move from all accounts to for example Ira if I want to look at those just in my margin account I can go to margin account and then again if I want to see all together just go to all accounts next thing porse within a portfolio one of the things first things that someone asked me about when they're first using thinker swim is how much how do I see how much cash I have how much my account is worth okay that's going to be found right over here in the left column among our gadgets now this first Gadget the account info Gadget is fixed we we uh it's not um we can't get rid of it basically these others here are interchangeable okay but under our account info we're going to see a few items of potential interest here for our options Traders they can see their option buying power for our Forex Traders a for Forex buying power and then probably more interesting to a wider audience is going to be the net lick and day trades net lick is an abbreviation for net liquidating value that's a bit of a mouthful what it means is if I were to cash out the whole portfolio sell everything put it all in cash how much is it all worth that's what this is so this is a $200,000 portfolio included in that portfolio is $142,000 of cash so you might say you'll notice it says cash and sweep vehicle this is really the cash in the portfolio so I might look at this and say all right within this portfolio well across our portfolios 142,000 in Cash Plus what another $58,000 of other stuff in this case mostly stock positions all right now looking at the rest of our gadgets you can see they're really um you can see why they're called gadgets it's just going to be uh interchangeable tools that are always accessible right there in that left column that may serve us uh one purpose or another for example we can see live news on a stock let's open this up and let's see what's going on how about we use Microsoft as our example stock today I can open up my live news Gadget and see streaming headlines of live news and click on each one of those individually to get live news updates I have a calculator here I have a watch list of stocks or uh that are that are either pre-built by me or by uh thinker swim and I have a scratch Pad where I can take notes hello everybody okay now those are not an exhaustive list of the potential gadgets we can switch a gadget let's say I don't need that live news feed let's switch this over and let's say I want to play a game I don't know there are lots of things that we can do with these gadgets so let's switch our Gadget and for example yes among the available gadgets there is there are games and go play Tetris all right maybe not let's switch this back to live news okay just be aware that as you're as you're uh changing up these gadgets switching these gadgets there's a lot of potential tools that we can use some are useful some maybe for taking a break all right now another thing is that uh we're not limited to just having four gadgets here I could add another Gadget by clicking on the plus sign down at the bottom that gives me access to that same menu and I'll be throwing Tetris right there and maybe hide it for a moment we can click on the little carrots those are hide or reveal icons all right and if I'm done with Tetris let's just uh delete that Gadget so by clicking on the little menu icon I have the option to switch or delete a gadget all right so that's your introduction to gadgets just very high level I'll let you play with those in your own paper money portfolio that's probably the best place to get acquainted with these things but I want to spend a little bit more time on some of these tabs and I want to do today just highlight a few of the basic elements of the monitor tab the charts Tab and the trade tab okay because when I first introduce somebody to thinker swim they most common questions that I get it's just a personal thing but they'll say hey Cameron all right I'm just getting started with this new software how do I get my charts how do I place a trade and how do I keep an eye on my trade all the other deeper analytical stuff we'll leave for another time but how about we start off with just an over overview of the monitor tab so if we look here monitor again this is where we'd go to monitor existing positions or trades that we placed that haven't yet filled there it's basically divided into two broad areas you can see here's today's trade activity it literally is just today if there's if there was a trade that we placed yesterday it wouldn't be displaying here but we can see working orders which are which are considered current as long as they haven't filled so for example I have a working order which is a stop order on my vrtx position down here so I can see that's a 323 $323 stop that I have in place I can also see that an order filled today I can see the time of that fill I can see how many shares I bought I can see what stock price or what stock it was and the price that it filled for all right and further down below if I had canceled any orders or rolled any positions today I could see that information now down below is going to be not just today but it's any current positions regardless of when they were acquired okay so this is our current position statement I can see here in this example paper money portfolio we have five positions Apple shell uh txn brtx and so on and off to the right I see a um a series of columns that just give me information about those positions so if I were logging to thinker swim and I just wanted to see well what happened today and how are my positions doing all I would do is go to the monitor tab look here I can see my quantity of my positions the uh price that I paid the current market price Mark is an abbreviation I can see how much that market price has gone up or down and my profit or loss since I opened the position we also just for today and finally I can see see something here called BP effect that's the buying power effect how much um there's there is essentially tied up in this position if it's in a margin account okay very high level introduction and yes a lot of this is customizable so many tools and techniques that I'm tempted to show you can't fit it in in a 25 minute presentation that's why you want to make a note to join me in this series as we move forward but how about let's go look at our charts let's add a trade and let's come back here and take a look at it in the monitor tab before we're done so we're going to go over here to the charts and and to get you quickly acquainted with this how about we go back to Microsoft and when I first type in a symbol and by the way I don't need this left column anymore so I'm going to toggle it closed there's a margin I can click on the margin right there and that just hides that left column gives me more real estate to work with here but you'll see here by default I'm looking here at a one-year daily Candlestick chart so let's get quickly acquainted with the layout of the charts and some of the basic tools we'll go place a quick trade on Microsoft as our example okay so you'll notice I put in my symbol right up here if I don't know the symbol I could just start typing in the name and it'll and and the system will propose a potential uh security for me and I can choose it there but once I've chosen my stock I get all kinds of data regarding that stock I can see the anywhere that I point on my chart I can see the the date the open the high the low the close the range of price PR is for that day and the Y just means where I am on my vertical axis here so if I move up my y value goes up as I move down my yv value goes down so all of that's captured right there and across this row of tabs I can see the current price of the stock whether it's up or down today the bid and the ask I can share this um chart if I want to create a link and send it to a friend who also uses thinker swim I can add technical studies here so frequently users of charts will like to use their favorite technical study for example let's just throw one on there very quickly if I click on my little Beaker icon it's G give me a menu of potential um studies that I can use I could go down in alphabetical order and find the one that I want out of the hund hundreds available or if I know the name how how about if we use RSI as an example let's just choose that from our menu add that to our chart and click apply and and there's our um RSI Okay click okay so for those who who like to use technical indicators that menu is how we add those indicators to the Chart yes they're customizable but as we go further across this row there are other things that we can do with our charts for for example I can change my chart settings here we'll do more of that in a future webcast I can change my time frame right now we're on a one day uh on a one-ear daily chart if I wanted to see this on maybe on a three-year weekly chart I could change that right there let's switch it back to a one-year one day chart I can change the style of chart here so for example I have um a candle chart at the moment I could switch this over to a line chart if I like let's switch that back we can make drawings so for example uh let's say I wanted to draw a line on my chart I can choose my drawing tools here I have all kinds of drawing tools let's just choose a trend line tool these are also available right down here but let's say for example we have a technically oriented investor noticed that Microsoft just pushed right on up through maybe that 340 level and maybe that leads them to some conviction that price is likely to move higher could be a million reasons why an investor might choose to buy a stock that's just one tiny little example but I wanted to show you that function of finger swim okay we can also access our studies here and for those that use price patterns there's a price pattern tool here but let's that's a that is a quick introduction to this chart so many other things I could show you here today but from here let's go place a trade let's say that we wanted to buy Microsoft how do we place a trade on thinker swm well we want to place a trade it's going to be a stock trade so we're just going to go to the trade Tab and on that trade tab we just need to make sure that we enter to the correct symbol now I already had that pre-loaded here but we just type our symbol in there and I can see our quote information right down here and on thinker swim placing a trade is really as simple as clicking on what you want so to place a buy order we click on the ask price and that creates a complete buy order down below the default is going to be to buy 100 shares of stock this is a Microsoft trade we can set a limit order or we can change this to for example a Market order we can change our time in force in other words whether it's a good for the day or good till canceled order I'm going to go ahead and place confirm and send not nervous about this at all because it's a simulated trade click confirm and send buying 100 shares of Microsoft not a transaction fee or a commission on this example trade but thinker swim will show fake commissions just like they would show uh other functions of uh of trading there is a reminder here with Market orders prices can change quickly in fast market conditions resulting in execution prices that can be different from the quotes displayed at order entry but let's send that off and we now own hun chairs of Microsoft and we can follow the progress of those hun chairs by going to our monitor tab there's our 100 shares of Microsoft and I can see how it's doing down two bucks okay guys that is a very quick introduction to some of the basic functions of thinker swim obviously if you don't have thinker swim you might want to down download it from your schwab.com account it's free to do it it only takes a moment and uh it gives you access to whole slate of potential additional resources also if you enjoy these webcasts make sure that you are subscribed to our Trader talks webcast from TD amerit trade Channel okay so you just go to YouTube Type in Trader talks pardon me Trader talks webcast from Schwab coaching we've had that important chain uh look for Schwab Trader talks and make sure you subscribed that'll give you access to our upcoming events and yes people are asking is this webcast scheduled to be uh recorded and archived you could find that here on our playlist yeah guys we've accomplished what I set out to do today when I kicked things off we wanted to explore think of swim navigation we wanted to download it and we wanted to even place an example trade so we have done that I hope you enjoyed the the webcast we're going to be uh moving forward in our series next week focusing on the monitor tab yeah I kind of brushed over it lots of tools there to explore I do have some suggestions for what you might want to do next first of all download thinker swim uh desktop if you haven't done that there's another series I think that's very complimentary to this one it's called exploring thinker swim I think that's going to be a great dovetail for these discussions and also review that how to thinker swim uh area that I showed you in the Thinker swim Learning Center all right that's a lot everybody don't feel the need to have memorized everything that I just said this webcast is scheduled to be archived you can find it if you're subscribed make sure you go to that uh that YouTube channel Trader talks webcast from Schwab coaching I'm going to let you go but thanks for giving your time today remember that risk is real we did use real examples in today's discussion it's not a recommendation or endorsement those Securities or those strategies I will see you again next Monday and until then I want to wish you the very best of luck happy investing bye-bye

Channel: Trader Talks: Schwab Coaching Webcasts

Views: 30,830

Keywords: Retail

Id: BhPmliFmIoQ

Length: 24min 44sec (1484 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 06 2023