Scanning for Options in Think or Swim

hey guys it's Simon and today's video is how to scan options on the thinkorswim platform so we're on the charts tab right now we're gonna click over to the scan tab and everybody's familiar with the stock hacker which allows you to add filters and study filters to UM to scan for stocks that fits or a certain criteria that you look for in order to trade well right next to it is the option hacker and that's what we're gonna be focused on in this video so we click on option hacker I'm gonna go through this real quick with the with buttons and some of the functionality of this but I actually have a pre-made scanner that I use and I'm gonna load that in but once I load that in you can actually see the settings I have and you can actually recreate it if you want to so in order to I'm gonna close these two out I'm actually gonna delete everything and start from scratch so what we want to do is we're gonna look right underneath option hacker and you'll see a scan in and scan in there are certain categories you can scan in all stocks all funds but what we want to do is all optional which means that any stock that has options that are available with that stock it's not all stocks have options next to it is something that we're gonna use here in a second but I'm gonna go ahead and show you real quick what that is if you want to intersect with something so I actually have a premade watch list and this watchlist has about a hundred stocks on it I'm gonna show you this right here I'm gonna go back to I'm gonna go to a market watch I have my watch list here and this watch list is actually called default because I actually named it that and it's mostly mid to large cap stocks it's high volume stocks very popular stocks with quite a bit of movement and these are the ones I kind of focus on when I'm when I'm trading options so if you'll go through the list here I mean there's Microsoft's in here Apple Google Amazon Boeing so these are stocks that I keep an eye on and a regular basis I don't watch all of these stocks daily but I do use this I use the net change a lot and see which one's had the highest gains which ones the most loss and I kind of focus a lot on the most loss and then when the high-gain ones I also keep an eye on to see if there's any position a put position you can actually jump in on so anyway so this this watch listen I have is actually going to be used in the scan so when you go to the intersect with you can actually load your watch list so I'll load the watch list and I just made it's called default I'll click that and so if I hit skin now and I'm actually changes to stocks I hit scan now it'll actually bring up that exact watch list cuz I had no filters on this at all so this is actually specifically what we're gonna be searching within this watch list we're gonna be adding filters or a scan presets can query and so it'll only search through the specific watch list and I load it but since I'm gonna be loading a preset scanner and this one's called option alpha if you'll see up on the top corset intersect with it actually removed that so what I want to do is put that back in and go to default again so now we have our our scanner and then this list is what its gonna be scanning for and so let's kind of go through what the scanner does so on the first one I have Delta and I have it at negative 42 negative 42 cents to maximum of 42 cents and this is kind of the options that are either in the money or close to being in the money and then next to that we'll have days of expiration I just noticed that that's actually 30 to 60 I 31 to 60 I guess I might attack I was kind of tied 30 to 60 I don't know why I did that but I'm 30 to 60 is about the expiration date that I'm usually looking for when I'm buying options underneath that is volume and this volume says 500 to max and this volume is not the same volume that you're looking at when you're looking at stock volume it's not the hundred thousand to millions of volume that we're looking for this is actually just the volume for the options so if you actually went to the trade tab and you looked at one of the options list you can see the volume here which is right on this the volume which is this column and this column so this is the volume that we're actually looking at we're not looking at the volume of the actual stock so we go back to the scanner and then open interest and open interest is the more open entrance you have the more chance that you'll actually have to sell buy and sell your option when you want to buy and sell your options so if you're day trading an option premium and you want to sell it at the specific price that that's specific time and the more open interest you have the better chance that you're gonna have to actually do that and their second me as much price fluctuation where you have to wait until the price hits until somebody's actually interested in buying your option premium so that's fairly important too so now that we have everything the way that we want it we're actually gonna hit scan and now we have one two we have eight stocks that fit our criteria and then what I would do here is actually I would go to the top right hand of this actual box and we can actually save this as a watchlist and so I would save this since Monday is gonna be the 24th I think of June correct I'm actually gonna change this 206 to for 2019 so that automatically saves this to a watch though so you don't add it each one separately and once that's done let's go back to scanner you can actually open this up under your and then we can actually we can we can we can actually take a look at these and do a little bit of due diligence and the other thing that we can do is we can actually go to where this chart is it has this little red symbol link we can actually click on the red symbol link here - which is right we'll pull this out make this a little easier on yourself we'll pull this out well click on this little red symbol link so it's actually linked there so these two are actually linked so if this was actually yellow we can click on this and being yellow and so what happens there is actually if you click on Tesla it'll bring up this chart is actually linked to this now I'm going to take it back to the original one red one or you can unlink it if you unlink it if you listen unlink it and if you unlink it when you click on Tesla nothing happens Facebook VIX but if you link it again to the actual Ming chart if you click on anything here it'll bring it up in there and that's where we do our due diligence and then choose the different options that we would be looking at to purchase an opening bell now if we go back to the scan tab we can take our scan that we just did and we can actually say that if I hadn't already saved it as something we can save it so let's go to this here on the top right right next to the sizzle index icon not sure what that is and we'll save a scan query and we'll call this you can call this whatever you want to then once you save it then when you go back to next time you do a load scan query under your personal option you'll have your saved scan query so I don't have to redo it every single time and then you can edit it also that's under here and you can edit the specific one and make it whatever changes you want to make the other thing I wanted to show you too is under the scan is that right now we're looking at stocks but you can also look at options or stocks and options so if I go to options and click scan it'll actually bring up under those those same stock tickers it'll bring up the actual options that fit exactly what your scanner does so you can actually click on one of these and see and buy this or sell this or you can add this to a watch list and then open that up under here and then you can since it's linked we'll go to the charts again and we'll click on one and this will be the actual option so you see the price if you take a look at this this is actually a spy which is S&P 500 and that trades around two hundred and I think it's two hundred ninety dollars or something like that so if you look at it right here you're actually looking at 175 to 180 - this is actually the specific option for that that fits your um the criteria that you're looking for so this is kind of the basics on how to do an option skin and think or swim I'll be making more videos obviously later if you have any questions comments please post them I answer every single one and if there's anything that you specifically want to see in a video comment that and I'll put it on the list of things to do so I hope that helps you give you a better idea on what the on scanning functionality for options on the thinkorswim platform thanks guys and I'll see you in the next video

Channel: Simple Simon

Views: 26,111

Rating: 4.9312978 out of 5

Keywords: options, day trade, day trading, options trading, stock market, trader, day trader, thinkorswim, think or swim, simple simon, simon

Id: gnifI39qPZw

Length: 9min 59sec (599 seconds)

Published: Sat Jun 22 2019