thinkorswim® Tutorial: Introduction to thinkorswim®

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Hey traders. I'm Mike Obucina, and in this video, I'm going to give you a high level walkthrough of the thinkorswim trading platform. Let's jump in. To start, we're going to download thinkorswim to our computer. Now, if you're an existing TD Ameritrade client, simply navigate to TDAmeritrade.com and log into your account. Once you're logged into the website, navigate your mouse to the Trade tab. And below, under Trading Platforms, you'll see a link for thinkorswim. When you click on that link, you'll be navigated to a page that allows you to download thinkorswim. Click that button and start that thinkorswim program installer. Once you've completed downloading thinkorswim to your computer, you'll notice that an icon now appears on your desktop. Double click this icon to begin the login process. Once the login screen appears, enter your username and password. Click log in. Now as a new user of thinkorswim, it's important to understand how the platform is laid out. Specifically, we have, on the left, our left sidebar. We'll talk about this in a little bit. And then the right, we have nine tabs that essentially hold all the different features of thinkorswim. And within each of these tabs are different sub tabs. For example, our nine tabs, we have our Monitor tab, Trade, Analyze, Scan, Market Watch, Charts, Tools, Education, and finally, Help. And below each of these tabs are sub tabs. For example, under the Monitor tab, we have Activity and Positions, Account Statement, FX Reports, and Strategy Roller. And as we move from tab to tab, those sub tabs also change based on whatever tab we are working in. Now let's jump into our first activity, and that's going to be to set up our left hand sidebar. So for this particular demo, I'm actually going to clean this entire sidebar up. By default, we're set up with live news, our Trader TV gadget, a watch list, and if we click this arrow down at the bottom, you'll notice that we have a quick chart also enabled. This is by default. So if this is your first time logging in to the platform, you'll see those four gadgets. Let's clean that up. I'm going to click this gear wheel at the bottom of the screen. And you'll notice that we have all these gadgets that I just showed you. And let's delete them all. I want to show you what a clean sidebar looks like. I just click those Xs, and you'll notice the only thing left is our account info screen. And that is the one gadget you can't get rid of. You can hide it with this carrot, but you can't get rid of it. And really, that's because this is an important section for every trader to have available to them. Now, let's set up our sidebar with two gadgets, Trader TV and a watch list. So I'm going to go to this plus sign. If I want to add a gadget, and you'll notice our whole menu of available gadgets appears, and we're going to hit Trader TV. It allows you to watch live news in real time. Every day, TD Ameritrade streams throughout the market day market news, information, different shows, great, great tool. Now, if I want to make this screen a little bit bigger, I'm just going to put my mouse in this dividing line and we're going to stretch that out. And now have a nice, large video player that we can have docked to the side of our screen. If you want to switch between TD Ameritrade Network and other channels, you can do that right here. But now, we have our Trader TV set up. I'm going to pause that for a second, and then the next thing we're going to do is add a watch list. Now, this is probably the single most used gadget on the left hand sidebar. Makes sense, right? Because as you're trading throughout the trading day, it's great to have a watch list available so you can keep track of the markets. I'm going to click that. And by default, you'll see that we have a default loaded watch list that we've created here at TD Ameritrade, but let's change this. For example, if we change this menu from default you'll notice a whole sub menu appears. And you'll see we have our personal created watch lists, but then we have a number of different public watch lists. For this example, let's add the Dow Jones Industrial Average, which are the 30 stocks of the Dow. We're going to hover our mouse over percent through G. You'll notice these are alphabetically listed. Then I'm going to go over here to our sub menu and go down to Dow Jones Industrial Average. And just like that, we have a watch list of the Dow Jones. Same thing as we did with Trader TV. If we want to enlarge this, just hover your mouse over that dividing line. And we're going to stretch that down. If we need to see more room, we can click that up. The other thing, if we want to close or shrink Trader TV, you'll notice our video players start shrinking, but then the available room for our watch list increases. Now let's move on to our Charts tab. Charts are probably one of the most used features of thinkorswim. The charting package is excellent. There's a number of different things you can do. One thing that every trader should know how to do is set up a type of chart you want to see, whether it's a candlestick, a bar chart, but also time frame. So let me show you how to do that. So by default, you'll see we're on a one year, one day chart. And you can see that duration here in the left hand corner. When you navigate the chart, you'll see that we are our mouse is highlighting with crosshairs where we're at on the chart. And as we move throughout the chart, the different values up here from the opening price, high, low, close, that's going to be based on whatever candlestick we're looking at. If we want to switch mean a different drawing tool, we can click this button and we can change to a pointer. So there I've changed to a pointer. Now if I want to zoom in on a section of the chart, I click my mouse, hover it over, and now we can look at a closer version of this chart over the last few months. If I want to zoom out, I can click this magnifying glass out. If I want to zoom in, you click the magnifying glass to zoom in really close. Either way, it's a very simple charting package to get used to here with these basic tools. Now, first thing, let's imagine we wanted to change this to a bar chart. Well, if you right click on the chart, you can see that we have this button called Style. Well, we have another sub menu from there. And essentially, the one we're going to look at is Chart Type. So right now we're on a candle, but if we want to switch to a bar, a candle trend, line chart, we just simply select right there. And you'll notice now our candlesticks are now bar charts. Really easy to switch. The other thing you can do is you can go to this gear wheel at the top, Chart Settings, and essentially do a lot of different customization from just general settings of the chart, adjust things on your price's axis, your time axis, you can create time frames for your chart, which we'll talk about here in a second. But more importantly, and everyone asks about this, is appearance. So what I just did with a couple of clicks, we can go into this Appearance section. We have that same types of charts that we can choose from. Let's switch back to candle. You'll notice our preview has switched the candle. We can change the color of our candles. So if we want to go from a green to gray, whatever really you want to see, you can do right here. It's a very widely used feature of the platform to customize your chart look. Once you're ready with the changes, you can hit Apply and OK, and now you can see where we're back to that candle setting with the original colors that we saw when we started. Next I want to show you how to change the time frame. So you'll notice, right now, like I said, we're on a one year, one day chart. If we want to switch that to an intraday chart, for example, there's this little drop down that says D, which stands for Day, or time frame setup. And when we do that, we'll have some preloaded time frames. So one day, one minute. And you'll notice, now, we are on a one day, one minute chart, and that D changed to 1m, so it lets you know you are now in a one minute chart. And we're looking at one trading day with one minute candle increments. So every one minute of market data will be a new candle. If we want to switch that, maybe look at a five day, five minute, that will change as well. And more importantly, if you want to create your own custom time frame, well, you just switch from Favorites to Time frame, and we just switch to whatever day period we want to see. Let's say we want to look at five days, and then go to a 30 minute. You can also move this bar at the bottom if you want specific customized time frames. It's extremely customizable, I guess, is my point I'm trying to get at. Really based on how you trade, how you look at the markets. So now we're on a five day, five minute chart for this Intel example. Next, I'm going to show you probably the most important activity that a trader should know how to do on thinkorswim, and that is how to buy or sell a stock. First thing I'm going to do, though, is going to collapse the left hand sidebar by clicking this button. Gives us some more real estate so I can show you the entire Trade tab, All Products sub tab. And what we're looking at is, essentially, the current market for Apple stock. At the top here, we have the stock name, the last traded price, the gain or loss for the day based on dollars and percent, as well as the current bid and ask. ETB stands for Easy to Borrow. So if you were shorting Apple, it'd be an easy to borrow stock. And then where is the stock listed? It is currently listed on the NASDAQ. So if we click this carrot you'll notice we have a bunch of different data points. This section is an extremely important section, but how do you actually buy and sell the stock? Well, it's pretty simple. You can do it a number of ways. The first thing, let's imagine we wanted to buy 100 shares of Apple stock. I'm going to hover my mouse over the ask price, and you see there's a little buy badge that shows up under my mouse. If I were looking to sell Apple, you can see I hover my mouse over the bid and a sell button appears. Now, if I click the ask price, you see an order appears at the bottom to buy 100 shares of Apple at a floating limit price based on the current ask price. And it defaults to a limit order in a day order. We'll talk about this in a second. I'm going to delete this order real quick. One other thing I want to point out, let's bring back our sidebar, you'll notice we had a bid and ask price in our watch list columns. So if I click on the ask price from the watch list, guess what? That same order editor appears at the bottom of our screen. So moral of the story is, anytime you see a bid price, an ask price, or a main price next to a symbol name or lookup, you can enter an order from that part of the software. So once again, let's click on the ask price. I'm going to walk you through this order really quick. We have stock. We're buying 100 shares of Apple. Current limit price of $257.66, and it is a day order, which means, if we were to place this order, it would be good for today's trading date. Now, let's say we just want it to get filled. We can switch that to a market order. We also have a number of different order types available in this order editor, but let's switch to a market, which means we will get filled that the best available ask price. Hit Confirm and Send. Now, this section of the software is extremely important. It is the order confirmation dialog. This is where you have your last chance to review and order, double, triple check all of this before you place your order. When you're ready, hit Send. And you'll notice up here at the top, we have some messages that appeared. We bought 100 shares of Apple. And then it goes away. So what happened to that stock? Well, this is where we move over to our Monitor tab. And Monitor tab, Activity and Positions sub tab, this will be the area for you to monitor all of your open positions as well as your activity for the trading day. So for example, remember we talked about or thinkorswim has tabs, sub tabs, and sections. Well, under the Activity and Positions sub tab section, we have today's trade activity. And this is where you'll see any of your working orders, filled orders, you'll notice we have one fill, and that was the trade we just placed, as well as canceled orders. Now let's go back and do one more example. Let's say we wanted to buy another 100 shares of Apple, but this time we wanted to do it if Apple dropped down to $250. I'm putting my mouse in there and I'm entering a specific price. That padlock is now locked because it's no longer floating with the current market. And we have a limit order that's good for the day, and we're going to hit Confirm and Send. And now if we go back to our Monitor tab, Activity and Positions, you'll notice we now have a working order in our working orders section. And it's essentially all the details we just looked at. Now let's imagine we-- so you know what? I want to place this order good till canceled, so that it works until either I cancel it or Apple fills it $250. You can right click. Now, in thinkorswim, the right click of the mouse is extremely important. If you're on an Apple, it would be the Command key and your mouse click button. But for PC users, if you right click your mouse, you'll see a menu will appear and we can cancel the order. We can cancel and replace the order. So we want to cancel and replace this particular order. So I'm going to change that, and I'm going to go here and change this to good till canceled. Everything else stays the same. I'm going to hit Confirm and Send. And now you can see we've got a message that our original day order was canceled. We can close it out by clicking the X, and then Monitor, we go back and you can see now we have an order working good till canceled. So what happened to our original order? Well, we go down to Canceled, and there it is. Canceled orders. Buy 100 shares of Apple, $250 limit for the day. We canceled that, replaced it with this good till canceled order. And you can see here, we have our filled order from a few minutes ago. So this is, essentially, where you're going to keep track of all your orders for the current trading day. This will clear out and reset every single day, and all of your order history will then be found under the Account Statements sub tab, Order History section. Now let's show you how to treat a call option. We went through the process to trade stock, now we're going to look at a process to how to trade a call option. Essentially similar, we're going to trade from a different part of the platform. So instead of our underlying section here where we have our bid and ask for the stock price, we're going to go down into the option chain. Then for the example that we're going to look at, let's trade the December expiration. And if you want to trade a call or a put option, it's the same process, we have our calls on the left, our puts on the right, we can show a few more strikes under this expiration series. And as you can see, we have that same bid and ask column that we see for the stock. Same process applies. If you want to buy an option, we click on the ask price. If you want to sell an option, click on the bid price. I'm going to left click my mouse on this $260 call in December on Apple. Our order editor appears. Our order quantity defaults to 10. You can change that by going to the Setup application settings, order default. So we can go to Options, and let's change that to 1 and apply those settings. And now I'm going to delete this and requeue the order up. And look, our order default has changed to 1. Same process. We can choose between limit order, market orders. With options, we generally want to use a limit order, so let's lock in that $6.25, hit Confirm and Send, and you can see we just got filled on our long $260 call in December on Apple. If we go back to the Monitor page, you'll now notice below our stock position, we have the December $260 call, one contract. And the same thing applies with the P and L opening day. You're going to see those numbers vary from day to day. But now we have a stock position and an option position. So you're probably asking, how do I close this position out. What we recommend is, go to the Monitor tab, activity positions page, and right click. Or if you're on Apple, command and click your mouse to queue up the order. So first, let's close out our stock position. I'm going to right click Apple, create closing order, and then you'll see an order queues up to sell 100 Apple at the current price. Whatever your quantity is, whatever your underlying instrument is, when you right click and create closing order, it will automatically populate the opposite of your existing position. Let's do this as a market order. Hit Confirm and Send, and now you'll see we were filled on our Apple, so we've taken that small profit from yesterday. And as you can see, our quantity is now 0. And finally, let's take a look at the Education tab in thinkorswim, starting with the Education sub tab. Now here, we've embedded the TD Ameritrade Education Center into thinkorswim, so you don't have to leave the platform to get access to the great education provided here at TD Ameritrade. Specifically, you can get access to videos recommended for you, upcoming webcasts, in-person event schedule, different coursework that we've created to help you learn different strategies and products, as well as thinkorswim tutorial videos. Now, all of this can also be navigated through this section here, if you want to learn about different products and different portfolio strategies, all of that is exactly as it would be as if you were logged into TDAmeritrade.com. One other thing I want to show you is the support chat feature up here on the right hand corner, click support chat. And under Live Support tab, if we hit Create Support Request, we can send a text message to our trade desk right here from the platform. Let's say you needed help with an order. You'd type that in and hit Create Request, and then a message will be sent to our trade desk. One of our representatives will receive that and start speaking to you over chat. They can look in and check out your screen and answer any questions you have regarding any issue with the platform. It's a great feature if you don't want to give us a call or if you're unable to. And that's a look at thinkorswim. For more information, head over to the Education Center at TDAmeritrade.com, and don't forget to watch the videos on our YouTube channel for more in-depth walkthroughs and tutorials of thinkorswim, head over to the thinkorswim learning center at TLC.thinkorswim.com.
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Channel: TD Ameritrade
Views: 698,872
Rating: 4.9294977 out of 5
Keywords: Thinkorswim, thinkorswim download, thinkorswim login, td ameritrade thinkorswim, trading platform, stock trading platforms, stock trading software, thinkorswim tutorial, thinkorswim scanner, online trading platforms, thinkorswim platform, thinkorswim indicators, thinkorswim backtesting, thinkorswim options, thinkorswim charts, thinkorswim learning center, thinkorswim demo, thinkorswim training video, thinkorswim education, thinkorswim guide, learn thinkorswim
Id: K4QYVvj_RCo
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Length: 18min 21sec (1101 seconds)
Published: Fri Nov 29 2019
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