Thinkorswim Scans Beginner to Advanced

hi my name is pete hahn and thank you for watching this tutorial video be sure to visit www.handtech.com for the full library of video tutorials i hope this video increases your knowledge and helps you become more efficient with this topic whether for home or work please support this channel by sharing these videos with your friends and colleagues hi guys welcome to the video in today's video i'm going to be showing you how to build your own custom scans on thinkorswim in particular we're going to be covering the stock hacker on thinkorswim we're not going to be covering any of these other options available for the thinkorswim scan we're just going to be focused on the stock hacker for today and during the course of the video i plan to cover everything from the most basic beginner level scans all the way up to the most advanced topics if you're viewing this video on youtube or some other video viewing service then you're going to want to go to our website which i will link in the description of this video so go ahead and check the description of the video find the link to where this video is posted on our web page and on that web page within the description of the video you will find something similar to this and because we're going to be covering a wide variety of topics of varying degree of difficulty you're going to want to go to our website to view the little table that i create after this video was published showing the start time for each of the individual sections contained within this video i can't show you what it looks like right now because i can't actually create it until the video is ready for publishing there's all kinds of editing and adjustments that need to take place and well i don't need to bore you with those details suffice it to say if you are viewing this on youtube or some other medium then you'll want to go ahead and look at the description of the video go to our website and you'll be able to quickly identify where to go in the video to find the particular topics that you are interested in and let's go ahead and give you a preview of the items we're going to be covering in today's video we're going to be covering top level filters condition groups five filter types time frames how to limit processing time saving a custom scan and then we've got some bonus material at the end and again as i said if you want to find anything in particular in the video and be able to go straight to it without having to watch the video or search around trying to find the topic that you're interested in just go to our website where this video is hosted and in the description of that video you will find a little index that will help you time frame on each section of the video and we're just about ready to begin but let's go ahead and make sure we cover the disclaimer and i'm not showing you really anything to do with trading in this video but i am going to be showing you some example scans and things like that so i want to make sure that you all understand that i'm here to teach you how to get the most out of your trading platform i'm not here to teach you how to trade or how to make profitable trades nothing in this video should be considered as a advertisement or a recommendation to buy or sell any financial instrument trading involves risk and that risk means that you may lose all or more than all of the money you have deposited in your broker's account okay great so we've got that out of the way and here we are looking at the scan now this is what the scan screen looks like the very first time you open it if you have modified your screen in any way make sure you have saved any scans that you have built but if you want to get back to this screen then you go ahead and click up here in this menu right underneath the on demand click on that menu and select reset it will not automatically save anything that you've changed here and you go ahead and hit yes and it will automatically refresh to the default view so we want to start from here because everyone can get to this spot right so the first thing we're going to be talking about are the top level filters what are top level filters the top level filters are the universe of stocks that the scan is going to look at to try to find the signals or the criteria that you add in the filter section and this is very very important because it plays an important role on how fast your scans process so you want to use these top level filters and i'm just going to highlight them right here we've got three so let's go ahead and review those we have scan in and we have intersect with and exclude so you have two top level filters that allow you to narrow down your focus of stocks you want to include in your scan results and you also have a top level filter that allows you to exclude specific ticker symbols from your scan results let's go ahead and look at some of those options because we're going to be looking at public watch lists personal watch lists and saved scans okay you can see right now it's automatically set to a category called all stocks you see that's the default when we hit the reset button it automatically reverts to all stocks and the other two top level filters are blank we're not going to review all of these but i just want you to be aware of them and you go ahead and explore these on your own you've got lots of different choices to pick from and you're going to have to make the decision based upon your own trading methodology what you want to use as your top level filters to narrow your focus so that your scans run as quickly as possible but also include all of the stocks that you are interested in reviewing one of the top level filters combinations that i prefer to use are scan in all optionable intersect with all stocks because all optionable also includes futures as well as stocks and then i like to exclude all over-the-counter stocks now that's just a basic setup if you're a stock trader whether you're a swing trader or a day trader and all you're interested in are stocks that have good liquidity good trading volume are regularly followed by other market makers and and market participants then this is a great way to set up your scan but you may find that you need to reduce but you may find that you need to restrict things even a little bit more clearly like for instance scan in you can change all optionable and change that to weeklies now weeklies is a public watch list okay it's not included anywhere here you've got all optional right but if you go down here to public and then and then you go down here to the bottom you will see there's a filter for weeklies and so what that's going to do is restrict only those ticker symbols that have weekly options now if you know anything about the options market you're going to know that if a stock trades weekly options it's probably among the most liquid stocks in the market so you want to keep in mind what is your target for your trading methodology and use this top level filter in a way that reduces the universe of stocks down to only those stocks you are interested in and i'm not sure anybody was watching but did you see over here all the way over to the right hand column you see the 474 matches here for these three stock filters well what happens if we change that back to all optionable now you've got we've got another 3000 to pick from so this tells you immediately exactly how many stocks are ticker symbols are included based upon your selection of the top level filter very important that you understand how to work in this environment and and adjust this because this is going to help you streamline your scans and get them to run as quickly as possible and focus only on those stocks that you are interested in trading okay also said that we could use a personal watch list so let's go ahead and press the reset button again and then we can go ahead and change the scan in from all stocks to any one of our personal watch lists now i have a personal watch list in particular that i want to pick we're going to pick this one right here pinning stocks you can see it consists of 46 stocks how do we know that look all the way over here to the right 46 matches now i've got a watch list already set up that displays these pinning stocks and i want to show you the list of stocks here on the watch list but then we also want to go ahead and run a scan so that you can see how my selection of the top level filter will impact the output of the scan so let's go ahead and hit that little push pin so that way we can click and act and actively work with the scan screen without our watch list disappearing behind the screens see that little push pin right there okay and then let's go ahead and hit the scan button now we haven't really entered any filter criteria you can see the three defaults net change volume and percent change are all left blank so we haven't really restricted anything we have not applied a filter at all and you can see that there are how many results right over here just beneath the green scan button showing 46 of 46 and that's how many we have here listed in our watch list okay so you can see them all right there i can line them up and you can see that each one of those are showing up in the watch list and they're also showing up in the results list of the scan so let's say we wanted to only identify stocks from our list that are greater than one hundred dollars well that's pretty simple we'll just go ahead and take the first stock filter let's change it from net change to close and we'll go ahead and adjust the minimum and we'll make it 100 and we'll leave the max blank you notice immediately we can see we've got 21 matches so we know that when we hit the scan button it's going to return a list of 21 stocks from our watch list and only those that are over 100 dollars in net price okay so just to review very quickly that's how you use a public watch list or a personal watch list as a top level filter for your scan we'll go ahead and press reset here and the next topic we're going to cover is saved scans so if you go ahead and click the scan in top level filter and you go down here to personal you're going to see some of these have special icons next to them these little purple circle within a circle okay those are saved custom scans and so you can actually build a custom scan save it and then select that custom scan as a top level filter so let's go ahead and take a look at some of the public watch lists that are actually saved custom scans so you can notice here we've got percent gainers percent losers gap down we go over here to the next section of public watch lists and we've got some more saved custom scans here you see every single one of those that has that special icon is actually a scan that think or swim has embedded within the scan engine that you can access anytime you need to you know all you have to do is select them as your top level filter so if you wanted to look at upcoming dividends or upcoming earnings you've got lots of different dynamic watch lists that you can use as your top level filter and when i say dynamic watch list a dynamic watch list is is a scan okay that returns a list of stocks we can go ahead and look at percent change gainers we can tell already that it contains a list of 50 stocks we can press the scan button and return that list and let's go ahead and check that we'll bring in our watch list here notice it's currently set to 24 hour trading that's another one of the built-in public watch lists so let's go ahead and change this to the public watch list matching our scan percent gainers and we can line that up and see that indeed the scan has returned a list of those stocks okay so for now we have concluded the topic of top level filters our next topic on the list is condition groups and within those groups we see that we have three different options that we can select and we can actually select all three of them and add each one of these groups to our filter criteria we have all of the following which is the default group that gets added when you press the reset button let's go ahead and do that now reset and now you can see that we have all of the following as our only condition group on the scan we can also add none of the following or any of the following or we can add any combination of the three so let's deal with each of these separately before we think about trying to combine them because once you combine them things can get really complicated okay so for those beginners out there who are just learning this let's just go ahead and slow down and take our time and go through this one step at a time so all of the following means that each and every one of these filters is going to be included and additive let's just say that let's say it's going to be additive there it's going to be this stock filter of net change and this stock filter of volume and this stock filter of percent change that's what all the following means so let's go ahead and demonstrate that we're just going to use these built-in stock filters but we're going to change this one to close and we've already demonstrated this actually so we're going to give this a range of 10 to 20. we can see that given our top level filter of all stocks intersecting with an excluding none we can see that we've got 7 400 matches if we simply look at stocks that range from 10 to 20 well let's go ahead and see if we can reduce that further we can look at volume and we can say we want a minimum volume of 100 thousand and we're going to leave the maximum volume alone now you can also click and drag i want to show this to you you can also click and drag okay so you can click and drag and you can see the value of you know the number of matches right now it's 34.28 we can reduce that further now it's 29.79 we can reduce that further now it's just over 2000 so you can also click and drag these ranges if it's easier for you to do so or if you just need kind of an eyeball like for instance you can click and drag the entire range and kind of select a sweet spot do you see the histogram there the histogram is telling you where the majority of stocks lie okay and we can do the same thing for percent change percent change let's go ahead and click and drag that you can see that little peak right there in the middle of the histogram we're going to click and drag that to kind of take advantage of the the whole the meat of that group of stocks and you can see that each time we apply that we're going to get fewer and fewer matches now it's additive so this stock filter alone is going to reduce it down to 74.42 this stock filter alone is going to filter it by 8043 and this stock filter alone is going to filter it down to 73.94 when you go ahead and click the scan notice you're only getting 1225. so they're additive okay so from the list of 7442 stocks the volume is applied to that list and further reduced and then that reduction so you've got two levels of reduction there then you add the percent change and it's reducing it further until you see that now you're down to 1225 stocks fitting all three of these criteria they're additive okay now let's go ahead and look at the next condition group which is none of the following we go ahead and click here and select none of the following it adds that condition group to the filter criteria let's go ahead and remove the other stock filters in the other section called all of the following so now we've got no filter criteria all we have is a top level filter for all stocks okay and what we're going to do is we're going to click the plus button to add a filter to the none of the following condition so we go ahead and select add filter we're going to select a stock for a filter and we're going to select close and we'll use something that we just used in the previous example we use a range of 10 to 20. and it says that there are no matches however what we find is that we have 12 643. so these are all the stocks and you can notice that right now you can look at the last this column right here last okay you can sort these results by that column but you won't find any stocks in this results list between 10 and 20 dollars as of their current close now let's say you wanted to add another filter to the none of the following condition group we'll add another stock filter and this time we'll go ahead and select volume okay so we've got a range a minimum value of 100 000 to a maximum value and then we'll go ahead and hit scan and what you're going to find in this case is volume located here in this column is going to be less than 100 000 for every single stock in the results list why because we added a volume filter from 100 000 up to the max to none of the following so what we've done in again it's it's additive okay just like all of the following none of the following works the same it's just inverted so instead of finding all stocks between 10 and 20 it's finding all stocks that are not between 10 and 20. likewise for the volume the volume is saying find all stocks that are less than 100 000. let's go ahead and clear that out in fact i'm going to go ahead and click the reset button and reset this back to factory default i'm going to go ahead and remove these stock filters from the all of the following and we're going to now examine the next condition group which is any of the following and just like before we see the instructions here click plus add filter to add a filter to this condition we'll go ahead and add a filter for stock any of the following right so we're going to select close and so we want to go ahead and do 10 and 20. i'm just sticking with really simple stuff here and i'm repeating the same thing over and over with different condition groups that you can see how the same exact filter criteria behaves completely differently in each of the three condition groups that's the main point to take away from this here is you've got these condition groups that allow you a great deal of flexibility in how you can use the existing tools to fine-tune your scans and zero in on the exact stocks that you want to see so right now we've got any of the following any stocks that are between 10 and 20. let's go ahead and add another stock filter and we're going to select close again and this time we're going to select a different range and this time we're going to select 50 to 100. when we hit the scan button what we're going to find is we're going to examine the last column right here the second column it's called last that's why i say it's the last column but it's actually the second column from the left okay and what you'll find here if you examine each of these all right there's 3032 stocks in this results list they're all going to be either between 10 and 20 or between 50 and 100 okay that's any of the following that's the condition group for any of the following so it's going to work the same exact way for any of the filter criteria that you add to this condition group and i think we've got everyone in the audience thoroughly warmed up and ready for more action here and the next topic we're going to be covering are the five filter types and we're going to take just a little bit of a pause here pardon the interruption but we do need to pay some bills and stay tuned for the next topic what we're going to cover next are the five filter types we've only been dealing with the stock filter types up until now and now we're going to be talking about the stock filter types the option filter types as well as the fundamental filter types and finally the study filter types let's go ahead and hit the reset button here so that we can restore everything to factory defaults and now we're going to begin reviewing the different types of filters remember we have five filter types so we already have reviewed the stock filter type and you can go ahead and review those on your own we're not going to be covering every single one on the list that would be a video to last several hours but you can just kind of scroll through this list and you can see that a stock filter is essentially anything that you can measure you know you've got earnings per share you've got you know high low close open you've got net change anything regarding the the price action of the stock itself okay so we don't really need to experiment much with those because we've been using stock filters for every single example up until this point so we can go ahead and remove all of those i've decided there is one very important thing i need to show you about a stock filter let's go ahead and add a stock filter and we'll go ahead and do the uh use close again and we'll select a very narrow range we'll pick five dollars to let's say seven dollars and we'll hit the scan button and then we've got a list of stocks here now you can see the column here called last second column from the left you can see everything there is between five and seven but i want to bring a chart into this and help you understand exactly how the scan is is using all right so you got a hourly chart i'm going to change this to daily so that you can understand exactly what the scan is showing you okay we're going to take the first item on the list what's the current price what's the last trading price of this stock it's 596. what's the value you see in that column 596 okay likewise if we go here to acbm this is very important i know a lot of people probably already get this and you're thinking oh pete come on move along hey there's some people in the audience that don't understand this very basic concept i see it all the time in the q a form and this is what this video is all about to help people understand the the basics the fundamentals of scans and what you find here is that everything related to a stock filter is based upon a daily time frame daily time frame so if it's close it's the daily close if it's the bid it's the daily bid if it's the high if it's the low if it's the open you get it you get it it's it's it's the daily if it's net change it's net change daily okay that's what stock filters are all geared towards daily okay the same thing is going to be true of the option filters as well as the fundamental filters okay so now that we've got that i wanted to make sure that was very important to uh to cover that we'll clear this stock filter out and we'll add an option filter in and let's look at some of these examples here we've got days to expiration boy that's an easy one that just jumped right out at me and let's say we want to see everything days to expiration 23 23 not 230 23 to a maximum of 46 because we might want to sell some covered calls and look at that the results list is full of a bunch of stocks weren't we expecting options let's see if we can change that we haven't looked at any of these settings here but let's go ahead and change that from stocks to options notice we had three choices there we have stocks options or stocks and options let's go ahead and refresh our scan by clicking the green scan button there we go now look at this we're in the stock hacker screen of thinkorswim scanning for stocks and we're able to actually scan for options so what we've got here is a list of options that are expiring anywhere between 23 and 46 days from now once again just like the stock filter we're not going to examine every single item in the list here for the option filters i'll let you explore those on your own but i just wanted you to understand exactly how those are working so the distinct difference is between a stock and an option filter is the stock filter is based on a daily time frame the option filter is is not really based on a daily time frame uh i mean the bid and ask probably are the delta the gamma open interest volume those are probably all set to daily time frames okay so be careful of that and be aware of it okay okay so let's go ahead and clear that out and take a look at the next one this is a fundamental filter now when you talk about fundamentals how i remember it is you've either got a you're either a technical trader or you're a fundamental trader right i mean they they put those labels on you you know it's just like politics they put these labels on you and you say well you're either a technical trader or you're a fundamental trader well what if you actually are somewhere in between well a technical trader is looking at moving averages and support and resistance and price action and volume okay fundamental is looking at things pertaining to the company's profitability so if you're looking for a scan on sales per share revenue return on equity return on assets quick ratio this is the place where you will find it if you're looking for short interest you won't find it here but if they ever add it to the platform this is where it will be short interest will be listed as a fundamental filter okay not available yet we've already posted that in our q a forum had a lot of interest on that and it's just it gets a lot of hits let me tell you people are searching for solutions they want to see short interest and think or swim and be able to scan for it and they're not finding it and i have to tell them sorry not available contact think or swim ask them to add it okay so i think you get the idea you understand how these filters work i don't think we need to put in values here and run a scan but you can explore this on your own if you're interested in fundamentals and you're looking for different fundamentals you know that that pertain to you know how you look at the market and how you make market decisions this is it have at it and remember that you can have it in any one of these three condition groups you can put these into all of the following none of the following or any of the following and you can mix and match you can put stock filters in one option filters in another you can dial this thing in and fine tune this thing to the nth degree without writing a single line of code all you're doing is clicking your mouse in some cases you don't even have to enter a value because you can just click and drag these ranges and have it all done right there for you okay now we're on to my favorite the one i use most frequently and that filter type is called a study filter type i call them study filters and we can go ahead and hit the reset button here and let's go ahead and clear out these stock filters that come in by default and we'll add a study filter okay so the brief overview of the study filter notice we've got some new items we've got some user inputs for all the built-in studies notice the default is adx crossover and you've got these built-in user inputs that's really handy sure wish we could do that for custom study filters we can't maybe someday notice we have some different types of controls over here too okay very very important study filters are the only type of filter you can add to a scan that allows you to control the time frame the scan runs in for some reason i see a lot of people on the q a forum totally obsessed over the one minute time frame and i'm going to tell you that in most cases a one minute time frame is the wrong time frame to select for a study filter it does not give you faster results it actually in most cases depending on the code but in most cases will cause your scan to run more slowly i don't understand why people immediately go to the it's like people getting on the freeway and going straight to the fast lane right it's called the fast lane i don't know why they call it the fast lane because if you spend any time in traffic you realize the far left lane if you're in the u.s where we drive on the right side of the road the far left lane is is never the fastest lane on the highway for some reason everyone goes there because they think it's a fast lane while as i'm over here in the number two or number three lane passing everyone in the so-called fast lane it's the same thing here with the time frames okay get away from the one minute time frame folks go to a five minute at minimum that's so that's the smallest value you want to use for think or swim why because all the scans run on the server you've got latency between your server and the thinkorswim server you've got latency involved at the server you've got the processing time at the server involved you've got you know probably minutes okay between you know hitting the scan and getting the results when the market is open and lots of volume is taking place okay so get away from the one minute time frame folks give it up okay if you want to scan use the use the largest time frame that allows you to get the job done okay and before we move on from the discussion of time frames applied to study filters i think it's very important that we explain exactly how much historical data is available for each of the time frames that you might select for a study filter let's go ahead and take a look at what think or swim has to say about this topic you can see we've got a section here from thinkorswim talking about study filters scroll down to the bottom and we can see that we have data limitations very very important pay close attention here to this part you can see that from a one minute time frame to a 30 minute time frame we have 15 astronomical days that's not trading days that's calendar days so take four weekends out of that and you have 11. okay so consider when you're doing a scan on a 30-minute time frame and on a 30 minute time frame you have roughly 13 bars per day and you have 13 times 11 so let's do the math here 13 times 11. gives us 143. so you've got 143 individual 30 minute bars available to the scan do you think you can calculate a 200 period simple moving average from that no you can't okay so consider that it's very very important now also consider from daily to one month from one day to one month you've got 730 days now that works out to two years and you know trading days we've got like 251 trading days per year but more importantly if you set it to a weekly time frame how many weeks are in two years that's 104 weeks in a two-year time frame so if you set your scan to a weekly time frame can you calculate a 200 week moving average no you can't so this is very very very important i cannot emphasize this enough i want you guys to make sure that you understand this and it will lead you to so much frustration if you don't know this so let's go ahead and take a look at some of these study filters there's tons of built in you've got bearish and bullish candle patterns and then they separate them out by bearish only and and bullish only so you've got all these candle patterns to pick from you got corporate actions okay dividends earnings splits crossovers all kinds of crossovers you know how many times i get a request in the q a form somebody wants a crossover scan and you know what i do i sigh why because it's all here and i have to tell them you can build this on your own it's already included on thinkorswim but they think automatically that there's you have to write code in order to do a scan on think or swim you have to write code no you don't have to write code you don't have to you can it's an option but i tell you what if you learn all of these different study filters and how to apply them you can you can do almost anything that i can do with code you can do in a scan and i do some advanced stuff for clients that are well beyond the capability of anything that you can pick here but but for the most part for for most general use you know ideas that people think of you know moving every crossover uh you know adx crossover um a bollinger band oh price crossing bollinger band you know i mean look at these you know popular studies and then look at the um you know the crossover studies you know everything is covered there almost it's like 99 of anything you would ever want is covered there okay i'll get off the soapbox let's get into a custom study filter this is where the rubber hits the road in my view this is the most exciting part of thinkorswim because why because i'm a software developer and i love to write code and it's my element it's what i love to do that's just me you know so let's go ahead and take a look at some examples in order to create our own custom study filter go ahead and click the pencil icon right here next to the time frame so we're going to leave it set to daily time frame we're going to click that little we're going to call it the edit button instead of the pencil icon we're going to call that the edit button go ahead and click that and we open up the scanner custom filter editor right i just call it the code editor you can see right now it defaults to the condition wizard that's the subject of another video altogether if you haven't seen it already we've got two videos that cover the condition wizard one covers specifically scans and the other covers condition wizard it as it pertains to custom watch list columns let's just go ahead and show you okay so we've got here thinkorswim tutorials let's go ahead and right click open a new tab go to that tab and i'll show you where to go we got the scans here okay you go to the scans you see right at the top of the list right there think or swim condition wizard okay and then if we wanted to look at watch lists okay that's down here at the bottom we're going to go ahead and click thinkorswim watch list and right here at the top of that menu is again the condition wizard for the watch list okay so go ahead and view those videos when you get a chance because using the condition wizard is fantastic you don't have to know how to write a single line of code all you have to do is be able to click a mouse it is so easy you can pick values studies functions prices you can do crossovers you can do greater than less than you can do is true is false you can change the parameters of the studies this is really awesome once you learn how to use the condition wizard and you learn how to use the scans on thinkorswim like i'm teaching you here in this video you're probably not going to need me much you know the only the only time you're going to need me is when you've got something that's nearly impossible to figure out and i'm going to be banging my head against the keyboard trying to figure it out but that's what i love to do so uh bring it let's go ahead and cancel this we're going to go to the think script editor and i'm going to go ahead because we said we're going to create a custom study filter well what are we going to do we're going to do a plot and you can put anything here for the variable name okay we're just going to call it scan because we happen to be running a scan so plot scan equals all right so that's the statement plot scan equal equals what close is greater than 10 and close is less than 20. sound familiar yeah we did this already we did this with a stock filter click ok click scan it runs we get the results same exact results we get if we run a stock filter using the same criteria so that's how a study filter works now i want to show you briefly how you take a custom solution that i've provided in the q a form or in one of my videos and add that as a study filter to your scan so let me go ahead and bring that up so we'll go ahead and open up our website and we'll right click on the breadcrumb there for stock scanners open a new tab and we'll go to that new tab and then we'll go ahead and sort this by most views and we'll pick the first one right off the top of the list here thinkorswim scanner for new high intraday we'll go ahead and open that in new tab go to that new tab and you can see the description here you can look this up later and read that if you want but the real thing here is this is the solution that i provided and you can go ahead and copy all of that code and then you paste it right here okay we're going to oh and isn't that interesting i wrote the code out manually and the condition wizard recognized my code and was able to parse it out into two individual pieces in that interesting so you remember what the code looked like when i wrote it right and here's what the condition wizard does with that and it creates two separate conditions and if you edit those conditions this is how the condition wizard interpreted the code that i wrote by hand okay doesn't always do this especially as we get more and more complex you can see here when we paste this existing code that we just got from the website i'm going to highlight all of this okay and erase it we're going to right click and select paste i usually use the keyboard shortcuts for that but i wanted you to see exactly how that's done and now you can see that the condition wizard is completely grayed out there because there's no way the condition wizard understands all of the detail that's going on in this code and so you can see here we've got two scan signals this is one very important thing i want to cover in the video especially in this section of the video dealing with study filters when i do study filters whether i provide them for free via our free video tutorials or i provide them free in our q a form or if i provide them at a for a fee for our professional services that we do for clients i'm always including multiple signals at the very bottom of the code so a lot of people a lot of clients they've never seen any of my videos i don't understand how they can come to me and ask me to write them custom code and they haven't seen any of my videos but but it happens and so they don't understand you know they say hey it's only doing one signal how do i get the other signal you know so i have to tell them oh wow okay you need to view some of my videos because i do this on every single one there's two different signals here one is for daily high greater than daily high previous okay and the other one here if you look at that that's for daily low so you've got two different directions here and how do you change that you put the hashtag here and you remove it from here now we've just changed it from daily high to daily life okay and then you can go ahead and hit ok and then you run the scan and i'm not going to take the time to bring that up in a chart because we're trying to keep this short but really the the the takeaway from this the most important thing i want you to take away from what i just showed you is how do you copy and paste code custom code for a scan into a study filter and run a scan okay you can set the time frame here as i said before you can adjust that time frame to whatever you like okay and how you access that code is you click the edit button that little pencil icon you open it up you copy and paste your code here into the code editor and you adjust your signal accordingly now when i write code for a scan i always put all the inputs right up at the top that's just plain good form there's a lot of coders out there that put their inputs scattered throughout the code and if you're trying to construct a scan and a user is trying to update their inputs like they do a study then they're going to be lost because they're going to be scrolling through lines and lines and lines of code where are the inputs man i can't find that input well if you put all your inputs up at the top here then that solves that problem makes it so much easier for the end user think about the end user when you're writing code and posting it on your favorite forum okay make sure you do things in a way that is best for the end user so um okay off the soapbox again sorry boy you guys are finding out all my little pet peeves here in this video okay so um there you go if you wanted to adjust something like number of days you just change it right there you can't use in other words we don't get for a study filter okay a custom study filter we don't get to create user inputs like for instance with that adx that we saw here i'll go ahead and add a new study filter so you can see that okay we don't get to do this we don't get to add this you know adx crosses above and a value and controls we don't get to do any of that because think or swim has not enabled it even if you took this study and you copied and pasted well you can't there's nothing there right so how do they do that you don't even know how they do i know how they do it and it works for them but when i tr but we try to do it doesn't work for us so whatever it is that they've got uh for this they have not yet released it to allow you know the general public to do their own custom study filters and have these user interface controls you have to do it by clicking the edit button and manually changing the inputs right okay so make sure you keep track of that oh another thing i want to mention here anything that you do on a scan okay the time zone is going to be eastern time zone it's fixed it doesn't matter what you set your charts to it doesn't matter what you change on the set on the on the platform through application settings or anywhere else on the platform a scan always runs on eastern time zone so if you're working with an input that has a start time and an end time you know for market open and market close guess what you need to stick to eastern time zone otherwise you're not going to get the right result the other thing i'll mention here look at this market close right here see the 1600 you've got to be very careful how the code is written because if it's not written very carefully then this value is not going to work right we think the market closes at 1 600 hours it depends on what time frame you have selected for your chart now one mistake that i made when i was doing this demonstration here is we clearly have an intraday code for the study alert but i forgot to set the aggregation period to an intraday time frame okay so let's go ahead and take a look at a chart really quick here because i want to show you something very important about how you set time especially for the end point all right you've got start time and end time for a lot of different solutions you've got a start time and an end time sometimes it's due to regular market hours sometimes it's a way to filter by extended market hours whatever you do if you have a start time and an end time you have to be careful because depending on how the code is written you need to make sure you adjust that time based upon what time frame you're using for instance if we have an hourly time frame as we have here and we'll uncheck that box then we'll go ahead and go to our chart and we'll go ahead and change that to one hour now we've got extended time frame on here let's go ahead and bring up a stock that has a lot of data on it and we'll go ahead and change these settings here to turn off extended hours trade one of the things we're going to cover here while we're looking at this is the start aggregations at market open if you have that checked and it is checked by default on thinkorswim unfortunately if you have that checked then your most of your intraday charts will never match your intraday scans study filters conditional orders or watch list columns basically everything else on the platform will be out of sync from your chart if you have this box checked i always uncheck that box and i never use that it'll apply and okay and now we can look at there we go now we've got rollover lines okay all i wanted to do is be able to show clearly you know the first bar of the day and the last bar of the day okay so you see this right here do you see that 1500 down at the very bottom of the chart that is the opening time of each bar so if we go back to the previous bar that bar opened at 1400 hours this bar opened at 1 300 hours so if you want to get the close of the last hourly bar on the chart with the current settings the time needs to be set to 1500 not 1600 okay because all the bars on thinkorswim are stamped with the opening time not the ending time likewise if you have a start time that you need to adjust in your code then if your hourly chart and you're not including extended hours and you have the start aggregation at market open turned off then the starting time the first bar on the chart for each day is at 900 hours not 9 30. even though the actual trading doesn't start until 9 30. confusing yeah so when you're using an hourly chart i usually use hourly charts for futures because futures trade 24 hours a day and you always include extended hours and it's not an issue so okay that's it for the study filter that's about all i had to cover on that topic so let's go back to the scan and we can go ahead and hit the reset button there go ahead and close that reset that okay and i noticed as i'm checking my notes here i just covered some of the items that were supposed to be covered under time frames and so we've kind of blended that in with the filter you know the study filter topic so let's go ahead and take a look at one other type of filter and i forgot to put this on my notes in the beginning so it wasn't included in the slide that i showed you in the beginning but there are actually you know five different filter types i listed five but i didn't list all of them and so pattern pattern is another one now you've got lots of different patterns to choose from we're not going to review each and every one of these you've got each one has got different type of selections that you can adjust here okay time frame okay and you can you can edit the patterns are really really unique and i would probably need to show you how it looks on a chart along with this for you to really understand and appreciate you know the value that this that this provides here so you've got all these different and you can just check them or uncheck them right all selected all unselected right you know like i said you get to adjust your different parameters and things like that sensitivity and everything we're not going to get into all those details here this is just basically showing you this is how you construct a scan and this is how you add various elements to a scan but let's go ahead and look at that chart again and i'll show you how to find patterns on the chart see pattern analysis tools many of you never knew that this even existed it's there it's been there for a while you can check the box to show patterns or uncheck it to not show patterns you can select patterns and you've got classic patterns candlestick patterns and look at this they've got something new they've got fibonacci patterns boy i tell you what when this video is done i'm going to be experimenting with that for a little bit that's intriguing that's brand new guys that's been added within the last few months very very recent so one of the things that i really enjoy is the williams fractal that's down here william's fractal that thing's really neat really handy we got a post in our q a forum where i show how to change these wedge shapes here to values you select patterns okay and then you edit the pattern right by clicking the gear icon and then you go ahead and change the type right so you go ahead and set this to numeric and value at high this is for the up fractal for the down fractal we change that to numerical we change this to value at low and then we go ahead and hit ok and apply and okay and now we've got values in place of the wedges i showed that on my q a form somebody asked how to do that and i discovered how to do it and i showed them and uh we posted it on the q a form so there it is another freebie there here in the video so that's it that's pattern so that's that's how you connect what you know the patterns that you see on the scan with the patterns that you see on the chart it's not organized in the same way so you're probably going to be struggling to try and find okay what's dark cloud cover where's the doji and making the connection from one to the next because it's laid out differently and and and everything that's included for a chart might not be available uh here for the scan but if you if you click on that uh script icon just like anything else you can copy and paste the code into a custom study filter now that you know how to use custom study filters what a concept watch copy paste there you go so if you don't find a pattern specifically listed under the pattern filter but it is available in the chart patterns then you can go ahead and click that script icon copy that code out of that chart pattern and paste it into your own custom study filter okay let's see i'm checking my notes here and the next section is supposed to be time frames we've already covered that we did not really look at regular session versus extended hours that's really just a check box so any custom study filter if you set it to anything less than daily we'll pick a 15 minute a lot of times it will default to extended hours but you want to make sure that you make sure this is this very very important actually i i don't want to gloss over this or or make it you know as if there's really nothing to it this is extremely important because if you include extended hours in your scan but you fail to include extended hours on your chart they're never going to match and you're going to be frustrated and angry and you're going to send me emails or post something in the q a forum asking why it's not working and i'm going to have to inform you that you just needed to check your settings and make sure everything matches okay very very important and so if you uncheck that make sure that your chart does not include extended hours and if you check that make sure that your chart does include extended hours and the final reminder that i'll give you as we end our discussion on time frames is that remember that the scan runs using eastern time zone it doesn't matter what your charts are set to it always uses eastern time zone so keep that in mind when you're constructing your own custom study filters to run your own scans okay next is we're going to briefly discuss how to limit the processing time in other words how do we get our scans to run as efficiently as possible we've already touched on that throughout the entire video but we'll go ahead and review that right now and then we're going to get into saving a custom scan and that's going to go pretty quickly and then we're going to get into our advanced and bonus material and right about now is a great time to get up and grab a cup of coffee or stretch your legs we're going to take a brief commercial break and we're going to be right back with some of the most important topics in this video just to review if we want to streamline a scan in other words you want the scan to run as quickly as possible then you want to use the top level filters scan in intersect with and exclude to narrow down the scope of your search to only the bare essentials preferably you might select a personal watch list that contains only you know less than 50 stocks and use that as your top level filter your scans are going to run lightning fast even under the most complex conditions so keep that in mind that's one of the most effective ways now one one thing i'll tell you here that i haven't explained yet and i actually ran across this once before somebody felt that this setting right here you see where it says show the default value is 50 and you can select any number of values here from 10 to 2000 you can probably manually type values to probably put in a 435 if you want yeah okay that does not cause the scan to run faster or more efficient it doesn't do anything whatsoever okay because it's at the end of the process it's at the output side of the entire process it has absolutely no bearing whatsoever on how fast your scan runs so you might as well set it to the max every single time because this has no impact whatsoever on how fast your scan runs what does have an impact on how fast your scan runs is everything you do upstream from here which is the top level filters then your stock filters and anything else that you put here in your filters but you want to put in your stock filters and your stock filters will filter out stocks and reduce the the universe of stocks that it has to pick from before it gets to the study filter that's the idea especially if you've got a very complex study filter okay that that times out on you repeatedly over and over again what you need to do is go to the top level filter and then add in some stock filters as as your what you would call a pre-filter okay it's it's you're you're starting with a smaller number of stocks so that when it finally gets to the study filter to run the code against that list of stocks it's only got a couple dozen to work with instead of hundreds or thousands okay i think that's really all i have to say on how to maximize the throughput or the speed at which your scans will run okay there's not a whole lot we can do with the code yes there are some limitations on how complex the code can be but in practice if you write code smartly and you don't put in a bunch of garbage that's not needed then you know you're really not going to find a huge gain okay by by adjusting the code i actually get people post on the q a form or send me emails really there's very little we can do by redesigning the code without breaking the code the best thing you can do to improve the performance of your scans is further upstream and i hope that you understand that now that we've explained it in depth throughout the course of this video so how do we save a custom scan you can see here from this hamburger menu not this top one here okay where we usually use the the reset okay we can reset right there but it's the one right below that you see there's three menus actually stacked together right here so it's easy to get lost don't get confused but it's this one right here okay you click that you've got a button here for save and then you've got a button here for load and you've got a button here for share okay not much to show you there but what we'll do is we'll go ahead and save this we're going to put it some we're going to put a 0 in front of this so it floats to the top of our list video example all right there we go something simple we'll save it doesn't really mean anything but notice that now that we've saved it it will be available within our personal watch list right here as a dynamic watch list that we can use as a top level filter do you remember that from the beginning of the video well if you skip the beginning of the video and you think that this just blew your mind you probably want to go back to the beginning of the video and watch it from the start and now that we've saved this custom scan how do we know what scan we are currently viewing that's over here in the upper left corner it says setup scan you can see the name that i just entered when i saved the video okay you can open and collapse that i don't really not sure what usefulness that is but if you go ahead and select another scan this is one i use as a template how i start all of my scans you can see that it changes the name that's displayed over here now here's the peculiar thing about a scan okay we just loaded this scan right here template we can load that scan onto a watch list but if we make changes without saving the changes are not saved you follow what i'm saying i mean it's easy to miss it's too easy to miss so i really need to show you watch we're going to make a change we're going to add another study filter and we'll just pick something it doesn't matter bollinger band crossover okay so i've just updated this scan right you see it's still the zero template and if i had assigned this scan as a dynamic watch list all right so it's in a watchlist gadget and it's updating stocks live as as the scan is running in the watchlist gadget itself okay and i make a change here but i have not saved it that change does not get carried over to the custom watch list column that is currently running the scan it also does not get carried over to any dynamic alerts that i've created from the scan you need to save it if you make a change you need to save it it does not automatically save it if you go up here to this button here and you click reset you see this warning right here that's warning is telling you that if you made any changes to your scan they're not going to be saved all right so if you don't if you think to yourself oh no i made changes and i want to save those click no don't click yes like we've been doing throughout the video click no and then what and then go over here to the second hamburger menu select save scan query okay and then hit save now i don't want to save the change there because i really don't want that change so i'm just going to remove that okay so that is how you save a custom scan that's how you modify a scan that you saved and that's how you save the modifications to your saved custom scan and you can see here that i've got quite a quite a lot of you know i do some uh you see these ones here that have you know first and last initials that's what those are for um you know some clients that i've worked for and when i do that then i can go ahead and share if for instance they haven't watched this video yet and they don't understand anything about building a scan then what i can do is load their saved custom scan and then i can select this menu here and select share scan query and i can name it whatever i like and what it does is you hit the share button and it creates a url that you can then uh paste into an email or something like that so that the other person is able to open up your scan now realize though that this is public you know people other people can find it so don't put anything in here that is mission critical uh and can't be released for for for to the public you know because even though you can protect your stuff you know to some extent if anybody has the link they can open it or if anybody can guess the link to think about that and final thing i'll say about these share links these share links are available throughout the platform you can share watch lists you can share charts you can you know share scans obviously as we just showed you i avoid using them i i use them as a last resort and i discourage anyone using them especially when they post in the q a forum because they do have an expiration date they can be revoked if if you need something that's going to last and be durable for a long time just save it to a plain text document and store it in a safe place or or send it to whoever you're trying to send it to try to you know limit your use of these share links to only when it's absolutely necessary okay we've pretty much covered everything that i intended to for the for the for the basics okay now we're going to get into the bonus material and the advanced topics but i do want to make sure that we've covered a few other items here do we cover everything in the menu here we've got a way to detach a scan so you can detach the scan itself from the main window of thinkorswim so if you wanted to run that side by side next to a chart okay you could do that and let's see what else we've got here you got a print now so if you've got a printer then you can go ahead and set up i don't have a printer set up we need to have some scan results don't we we'll go ahead and hit reset yes run the scan let's go ahead and try some of this stuff now i'm on a mac and i don't have a printer i haven't had a printer for decades i don't use printers so we can save as a pdf all right export to file okay so here is a way that it will export the results list to that's pretty handy spreadsheet kind of thing cancel that okay let's see what else we've got uh take a screenshot this one is really handy uh you know how many people send me this is true actually i've seen it in a q a forum and i've received custom project requests and emails from people where they actually send me a picture they took with their cell phone of their computer monitor when think or swim has a built-in screen shot tool already built in all right there's the controls down at the bottom right you got copy save print close okay so you can take a screenshot of just about everything on the platform all you have to do is access it from the menu there's a handy tool there so we've covered everything here there wasn't anything else there to show you i think we've pretty much got everything uh working here so you can remove all filters you can remove a condition group now we don't have any condition groups how about that i didn't know we could do that so there we have that okay so i've covered everything i think at this level so let's go ahead and go on to the bonus material thanks for sticking around for this part of the video this probably for for you advanced users this is probably going to be the meat and potatoes of the entire video we're going to be looking at modifying the columns in the results section we're going to be looking at how to export the scan results to a personal watch list that's a static personal watch list and it does not update in other words we're also going to be showing you how to create a dynamic watch list okay basically you take we've kind of already hinted at it but you take a saved custom scan and use it as the source of a watchlist gadget and then we're going to show how to create dynamic alerts from a saved custom scan this is really powerful because you know chart alerts don't send email or sms notifications so you don't have you have a study alert right so you use a study alert but that's tied to a specific ticker symbol if you want to be able to send sms or email alerts for some custom code that you have then you have to use a scan and i get a lot of clients that don't really understand that and can't really grasp that so we're going to show how to take any custom scan and use it to create a dynamic alert that automatically notifies you at the times you want to be notified in the way you want to be notified and then we're going to show oh the dreadful this script has timed out message we're going to show that i know how to make that happen so we're going to make it happen and show you how to tell when your script has timed out this will save you so much pain and suffering you won't even believe it so many people are running scans they're timing out they don't know where to look for the message and they don't understand why their scans are not working they think they're just broken they think they're not working but in reality they're timing out okay so we're going to modify actually you can see that i've already modified the results section of my custom scan when you click the reset button here the columns in the in the results section do not update they do not change so any changes that you make here are going to be retained even if you hit the reset and even if you save a custom scan and open up another custom scan whatever you see in the result search results okay i call it the results list that is going to remain unchanged it's static so whatever columns you add or remove here are going to remain just as you left them we've got some items here for saving a watch list and alert when scan results change that's coming up soon you click on the little icon okay that's why i clicked on the hamburger menu to point out that very tiny little itty bitty tiny gear icon that you can barely see and and the menu pops up i'm sorry for this but the menu pops up here off screen not to worry i am a trained professional and i know exactly what to do so we'll move this over here just a little bit so that when i click on that tiny itty bitty little gear icon you can see the menu that pops up and so we've got we can change the sorting behavior and we can customize okay so what we're going to do is select customize but first i'm going to move this back over here so that you get the full view and we don't miss anything and off screen here i'm going to select customize and here is a list of all your columns now this is exactly the same way that you would modify the columns of a custom watch list it's exactly the same in fact you have the exactly the same list of columns available okay including custom columns if you go ahead and select custom quotes then you've got all your different custom columns in here that you can add and so that's very handy if you have some custom columns and you want to export how should i say this you want to run a scan but within that scan you want to sort by some special metrics that's not available on the platform as a as a regular built-in column let's say and so you build your code and you add it to a custom quote and you add that custom quote you know like this one here and you add that to your results list and now you've got that value that metric that you can use to sort your scan results list it's a way that you can do research you know that's how i view it you know it's not exactly an excel spreadsheet i'll tell you that much but you can sort by that column and that's very handy so if you have a metric that you know compares one value against another or some you know an rsi value and you want to see how many stocks you know of of the stocks in your list which ones have the lowest rsi value you know the ones that are most over sold right uh and so you can sort your results list that way all right so i don't think we need to cover any more because if you're familiar with how to navigate different columns adding and removing columns from a watch list this will be second nature to you if you're not already comfortable and familiar with with the watch list and how to modify columns and stuff we've got lots of tutorial videos on that topic so we're not going to get into those details okay next we want to show how to export the scan results to a personal watch list so first let's go ahead and grab my template because that's going to be very restrictive here template we don't want too many stocks okay so yeah that's a good one to use and then we're going to change all optionable as we saw earlier we're going to use a public watch list called weeklies and we're going to change that so that's going to be very restrictive there we can get rid of this and we'll hit scan and see what we've got we've got 474 results we've got 50 showing and so what we're going to do is select this menu here and it says save as watch list so we're going to save that watch list we're going to use a numeric value here just so it floats to the top we're going to call it video example 2 so it's not to confuse it with the saved custom scan that we created and so we've exported that to a watch list now we open bring in a watch list gadget and we select that from our list of personal saved watch lists right video example 2 that's the one that i just saved it is the results list from that scan that i just ran you can see there's about 50 stocks here so guess what it only exports the stocks that are showing in the results section so if you wanted to for instance do that again but this time export everything that's picked up by the scan well then you have to look at the scan and see how many total results there are in this case we're showing 50 of 474 so we want to go ahead and change this to let's say 500 so we capture all of it we do need to run the scan again so i'm going to click that green scan button now we're showing 474 of 474 and let's go ahead and see if we can export this save as a watch list we'll try to use the same name that we used before i'm not sure it's going to give us an error message or not it should tell us at least an error yeah okay so we're going to call this one number three okay that way we don't have to worry about trying to delete the other one before we can save it again using the same name and then we can go ahead and go here and select it and now you can see we've got all 474 results exported to a watch list now the big difference here is look at this these two here that i exported from the scan results section are static watch lists those are never going to change or update they are no longer tied to the scan you can save the scan you can modify the scan you can run the scan again these two watch lists are going to stay the same forever until you delete them or make other changes only these icons here these little purple icons are the only ones that are tied to saved custom scans that will update dynamically throughout the day and as i check my notes i see that that is exactly where we're at at this very moment okay so that is the next item that we're going to cover let's go ahead and run this scan so that we can again view the contents okay and then we'll go ahead and change this back to something else doesn't matter okay and then we're gonna go ahead and change it back to this one right here all i wanted to do is refresh the items listed in the watch list so that you can see that when i select the template saved custom scan as the source of this watch list watch what happens okay you see how that was blank for a little while and then it was populated that was the scan running okay now the scan has only returned 50 results why because i did not save the changes so when you make this change right here you see where it says show 500 okay remember the default it was show 50 all right so now what we need to do is save that we'll save okay hits the save button confirm okay all right so now we can run that scan again notice that we've got 474 we bring our our watch list gadget over here now i have not touched this watch list gadget do you see anything different you should immediately see that this scroll bar is tiny compared to what it was just before i made those changes and now instead of only showing 50 results in the watch list it's now showing all 474 that are being generated by the scan dynamically in real time now markets are closed so you're not going to see any changes but did you see how that it's very important that you understand that connection if you're going to use dynamic watch lists generated from a saved custom scan you need to understand how modifications to your scan need to be saved before they will update to the watch list okay and and this portion right here that i want to show you this little portion right here how many results to show are going to control how much gets displayed in your custom watch list okay in your dynamic watch list i should say next we're going to be talking about how to tell when a scan script times out so we're going to use one of my premium indicators here let's see if i've got it saved here anywhere okay so what i've done here is i've loaded the code for the volume profile premium indicator that i've created a scan for that for that indicator and i've loaded that here in this study filter we're going to go ahead and clear out these we're just going to go ahead and all symbols okay this and we're going to clear this we're going to clear that so remember how i explained to you the top level filter controls what it controls how narrow is the scope of your scan and right now because i've set it to all symbols with nothing intersecting and nothing excluded this is running wide open on the entire universe of stock symbols and future symbols that thinkorswim has available to it so we're going to run this and we're going to pause the video so that you don't have to wait for it to be completed and then i'll show you exactly where that message shows up to tell you when your script has timed out because you ran it against too many ticker symbols and this is what it looks like so when you run a scan and you see the animation of the thinkorswim logo right here stop when it stops spinning and you still have zero results in your scan look right here right immediately below that scan button okay right in this row here you see that it says error script execution timeout this happens when the scan is trying to run against too many ticker symbols the solution is to use the top level filter as discussed throughout this entire video to reduce the universe of ticker symbols the scan is running against that right there is gonna save so much pain and suffering i i can hear it right now i can hear it right now really i can i because i i've experienced it i've been through it i know what it feels like and when it finally dawns on you you get the hand the palm goes to the forehead and you say oh my goodness why didn't i notice that before so anyhow i know it's going to help a lot of people and let's get on with the rest of our advanced topics we've got the condition wizard and the multiple time frames well guess what we've already done the condition wizard kind of already covered that but we're going to look at it again let's go ahead and add a study filter and then we'll click edit and we'll go ahead and look at the condition wizard and again we can edit these conditions i've done two videos on this topic so i'm not going to cover this in depth you can delete a condition you can add a condition you can create a condition for let's see close crossing above a study of a moving average okay moving average exponential and you can adjust the parameters here okay and you can say okay so the close crosses above the exponential move okay and you can say for instance you add another condition and you can say let's say the study of rsi is greater than a value okay a value of let's say it's greater than 80. okay so we hit save and so now what we've got is the close crosses above the moving average exponential and rsi is greater than 80. and we see here we've got check if all of the following conditions are met so we can select all or any and it works very much like our condition groups in the filter section of the scan okay as i said we've already done a couple of videos on this topic i've shown you where to find those on our website so i'll go ahead and leave you to that so that you can review those at your own time frame so let's go ahead and look now at the last one i wanted to cover was multiple time frames okay so for multiple time frame let's go ahead and go back to the website and let's go to free tutorials we're going to open a new tab and then we're going to go to that new tab we're going to select scans and we're going to go down to the multi-time frame macd scan it's an article it's not a video and we're going to scroll down here and you can see how the multiple time frame scan is constructed okay we don't really need to go through it here in this video but i need you to understand how this works okay study filters of a scan they don't accept secondary aggregation periods in other words you can't take the code that prints a multiple time frame study on a chart and just copy and paste it to a scan it won't work it won't be accepted because you can't do multiple time frames in a single study filter so look what we've done here we've added three study filters and setting each one to a specified time frame in this case we've set it to monthly weekly and daily and you go ahead and put the code in just like you do for any other study filter now remember everything in this filter is additive meaning that if you have the three different time frames the code the signal i should say from each of the three time frames will be combined together so that the results that you get in the scan will be based on all three of those time frames being aligned together and so we've already got the article here on our website and we've got the code here you can build the multi time frame macd and we've got a chart study and a chart strategy based on the multiple time frame macd it's very popular i'm sure most of you already know about it so i'll leave you to that you can go ahead and check that out when you have time the other thing i'll point out are a couple of the posts in our q a forum where people have asked for things like you know we got percent increase for price and volume and above v web and i was able to build that right here using the standard tools there was they were expecting a custom code solution and here it is right here i built it for them and showed them look you don't need any custom code you can do it all you got to do is click your mouse you don't even have to touch the keyboard another one i wanted to show you this is price more than 50 percent below 52 week high now how do you do that right well what's interesting is what we did is we we used to add add a condition group and the conditional group was none of the following and what did we do we say okay normally this would only find stocks that are within 50 of their 252 period high daily right so that's a that's a one year high so because it's set to none of the following it actually performs the inverse it actually excludes all of the stocks that meet that study criteria okay see we'll close that down there was another one i wanted to show you exclude stocks that have gapped up so once again we have a built-in study gap within time there has been at least 50 percent gap within the last 10 periods and what do we do we add that to none of the following so that those stocks are excluded from the scan and now we're going to go ahead and show you how to create a dynamic alert from a saved custom scan so notice i have loaded one of my saved scans here it's a template that's the name of it anyway and there's really not a whole lot to it it's going to return a list of 474 stocks and so i'm going to show you step by step now how to take this saved custom scan and generate a dynamic alert from this now what is a dynamic alert exactly a dynamic alert is something that runs on the server of thinkorswim so let's say you wanted to receive notifications via a text message or email or through the mobile application they call them push notifications and you wanted those to occur during the day when you're not at the computer and you're not even logged into thinkorswim how can you do that well you've got study alerts okay you can do that with a study alert the problem with a study alert is it doesn't allow recursive variables in the code so if you have a custom study filter that has some recursive variables in there like an atr trailing stop for instance then you won't be able to use a study alert so the only other way to get text message email or mobile push notifications from the thinkorswim platform is to create and save a custom scan and then use that saved custom scan to create a dynamic alert and here are the steps we have a little hamburger menu over here just below the green scan button remember now we've got a save as watch list but that's not what we're going to do we're going to alert when scan now you can't see the rest of this it's kind of off screen here let me move this over just a little bit so you can see this alert when scan results change okay so i'm going to move that back over so we've got a view of the full screen and then we're going to select that alert when scan results change now i wish that you could you know resize this window so you can see every element in the window you can't it's kind of annoying but we'll just kind of deal with it anyway so you've got lots of different choices here notify me on change of scan results so what's going to happen is when you create this alert it's going to actually run the scan in real time continuously on the thinkorswim servers regardless of whether you are logged in or not okay so you've got the name of the scan is included here you have an event okay when a symbol is added or when a symbol is removed or a symbol is added or removed so any change so you get to select there depending on what you want now you're going to have to go ahead and and practice this and experiment on your own to find out what works for you and we've got a edit screen here so we can actually edit some of the aspects of the scan that's interesting but if we've already saved the custom scan we don't need to worry about that you can add notes here that will be included in the notification let's go ahead and expand this section here notify with sound comma email so we're going to expand that and then scroll down to view its contents notice that you can select a sound or no sound you can even select custom sounds this is fantastic so you can actually get those sounds while you are logged in to the platform on your computer you will get these sounds or if you're not logged in and or whether you're logged in or not actually you can send email to specified email address send text message during us market hour send text message after us market hours send push notifications to mobile devices this is if you have the mobile app installed on your device and you have notifications enabled okay so you check whatever box works for you now we're going to go ahead and collapse this section and look at the next section which are the options that's the third and final section here for creating a dynamic alert and we just want to go ahead and review the options we've got a message for every change or a list of changes hourly daily or weekly you can have it expire it defaults to not not specified which means it's going to exist until you cancel it manually or you can have it go ahead and cancel on its own at a specific date and time and if you want a reminder before it cancels then you can go ahead and check this box and select your option here and when you are done making those adjustments to your settings then you go ahead and click the create button there was an option there at the bottom of the screen to automatically take you to the watch list alerts screen so that you could view your alert but i'll show you where to find that so you go to market watch make sure that you select alerts from the views and this one right here at the top is the one that we just created you can see the context there it shows the name of the saved scan it shows the source of that alert which is a scan and it shows some of the options that you selected in the previous steps and when you create this then it will run continuously until you cancel it and it will give you alerts based upon those options that you selected in the previous view and when you're ready to cancel it and you no longer need it to run anymore you can just simply click this do not enter sign or you can right click anywhere over it and select cancel alert now none of this will work unless you set things up in the application settings so that you have a validated mobile phone number and a validated email address okay so in order to do that you go to setup application settings go to notifications and this is where you will go ahead and confirm your various email addresses and phone numbers and then make some selections here as far as how you want your notifications delivered so you have to do this part otherwise none of the other stuff will work in other words you've got to set everything up here before you can use the dynamic alert or the study alert okay so make sure you understand where to set things up where to adjust your settings it doesn't happen automatically we can't just simply write some code to make this happen you've got to set this up on your own okay guys that's a wrap we are done congratulations if you stuck with it for the entire video your brain is probably on overload and you probably need to go grab a cup of coffee take a nap maybe go out for a walk i tell you i'm wore out uh but i'm so i'm so glad i was able to do this i've had this idea in mind for such a long time and you know the genesis of this video was and i probably should have said this at the beginning but the genesis of the video was that i've got a lot of clients that i work with and a lot of clients are coming to me and they want a custom scan and they expect it to just do it by itself they expect it to just happen and and they don't understand that in think or swim you've got to learn how to operate in the environment yeah i can build the scan for you and yeah i can create a share link and i can send you the share link and you can load it but you won't be able to change anything about it if something changes in your environment or you need to make a modification or something like that if you don't know how to work in this environment i haven't done you a service i haven't done you any any good at all so what i need to do is make sure that clients who come to me looking for custom solutions for scans that require complex code that they can't create on their own i need to make sure they have a resource they can go to to get everything every bit of piece of information they need to to learn how to make the best use of that tool that they're paying me to build and so that's the genesis of this video and i hope that it helps everyone that views it in some way shape or form or another and thank you so much for all of your support i'm so grateful for all of your shares all of your likes thank you so much for sharing this with your friends and for spreading the word for people that are struggling to learn think or swim it is a very complex environment and a tremendous amount of flexibility and and capacity and and we just need somebody to be able to walk you through step by step showing you every little bit and piece and that's what i'm here to do i'm here to help you guys learn how to make the best use of the platform so thanks again guys take care everyone thank you for watching this tutorial video be sure to visit www.handtech.com for the full library of tutorials i hope this video increases your knowledge and helps you become more efficient with this topic whether for home or work please support this channel by sharing these videos with your friends and colleagues thanks and take care

Channel: Hahn-Tech, LLC

Views: 41,084

Rating: 4.9669724 out of 5

Keywords: Thinkorswim, Stock scanner, custom scans, stock trading, stock market, Stock charts

Id: _0e2zJFmsgc

Length: 93min 5sec (5585 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 15 2020