ThinkOrSwim Tutorial - Options Hacker

hey guys Josiah here from thinkorswim dotnet just want to do a quick video on the option hacker tab in thinkorswim there's not much information out there on the internet that I've noticed and so I thought I'd go ahead I've been experimenting around with it lately and I thought I'd go ahead and do a quick tutorial just to help out some people that are probably baffled by it in some ways like I was at first and so let's go start here so I'm in the scan tab and thinkorswim and I've clicked the option hack or sub tab here and so now I've got a blank scan setup here there's no filters at all and I'm scanning in a category of all optional stocks or all issues that are optional so that narrows down the universe just a little bit for us in advance now what you'll notice here is they have where you can intersect that with other lists say say you only want optional from NY se so you can intersect it with that or you know and you can also create your own lists of stocks and import those and so you could intersect you could search the universe of all optional stocks within a specific watchlist that you import that you know maybe all the stocks that you like to watch or something like that a custom list that you've made or any of these lists that that thinkorswim provides or any of your custom scans but anyway I'm going to leave that on all optional and so you'll notice down here we have we can add these different types of filters and this is the confusing thing in option hacker you need to start by narrowing down the stock the underlying stock criteria to narrow down the universe of options that that will be returned so we can set this to I want the last price of the underlying stock to be at least ten dollars and no more than $200 so it will only return options for stocks that fall between these prices then let's say we want today's volume to be at least a hundred thousand shares we'll say and maybe we can add a stock study filter now don't get confused by this the study filters even though we're under option hacker these only apply to the underlying stock and so a lot of people try to to use these to these studies to scan criteria against an option universe and they get results that they don't understand and that's because these only scan against these only filter the stocks themselves not the options so we're in studies here and I'm going to go to volume and I'm going to say average volume for this stock over the last twenty periods I want to be greater than 500 thousand per day and you can see here it's the aggregation period is set today but you can just as easily say I want it to be 500 thousand every 30 minutes or something or every week or whatever you want but so I want the average daily volume for this stock the underlying stock to be at least 500 thousand okay so now I've kind of narrowed down the list and I haven't added any option criteria yet and so it's not going to give me any results I am down here you'll notice that I have selected return 200 options you can tell it to return stocks options or stocks and options I'm gonna leave that on option but it won't return anything because I have no filter setup for option yet so I'm going to add an options filter here so we've added a stock filter we've added a stock study filter and now I'm going to add an and filter and we'll just say let's see well first of all let's narrow this down a bit by just saying I want only calls I don't want don't want this filter to return any puts so that'll narrow down the cut the list in half or so and let's see we want we could say Delta we want Delta to be somewhere between negative point 45 and positive point 45 just try to find some that are closer to end the money there so let's see what this does for us now we've added some options filters so it should give us some results now now okay so we've got some results here it says showing 200 which I set here the I wanted it to return 200 the first 200 options and it's showing 200 options of a hundred and seven thousand that are actually the results of this search so there I mean there's literally a ton of results for this so I I usually keep adding filters here to try to narrow this down quite a bit and and get a more manageable number of results so we can actually load this up in charts I by clicking this button here I've added this column here by clicking this button it will add it to my red chart I've selected red here and you'll see that it's loaded that option symbol up here in in the result or in the the chart symbol so this is actually the option this is not the stock I'm looking at the actual option trading activity here so then you could go ahead and place your orders based on this chart and and trade the option that way now once you have all the filters setup that you want and by the way I also have this custom spread column here that I've sorted in ascending order so I have the lowest spread results showing up at the top up here and so that can be useful for you know locating options that are not incredibly spread II and that you're not going to lose your shirt on just from the spread or whatever so after you have all the settings set up that how you want them and you've narrowed your list down you know maybe you want some you know maybe you want the open interest you know minimum open interest on the stock yeah I don't know let's just put it a number here and so that will shorten down the list quite a bit and then once you've got everything set up how you want you go up here to this menu and you click Save scan query give it a name blah blah blah and then whatever you want to come back here if you you know you you changed all this you've loaded something else whatever you've done when you're ready to actually do some more scanning now I have to remember what I actually named that I think it started with an S if I remember right yeah so here we go so it loading that up under load scan query personal and whatever you saved it as under this alphabetical list here and so I saved it as this random string of characters and that will load it up in here and allow you to just instantly go ahead and scan you can also select anything here that you want it to automatically sort it by and whether you want it to sort it ascending or descending so there you go I hope that gives you a little bit of an introduction to option hacker since there's there's not much information available out there even from thinkorswim themselves the main things you need to remember is like I said this you need to narrow down the list by the actual underlying stocke you're skimming against the stocks first so you add these stock filters with this button then you add any study filters you want like you know price change maybe you want to scan for options on stocks that have gapped today you know that they have an opening gap today and so you could go into the study here and say price performance I want it to be a gap up stock or a gap down stock so forth you could have any stock study filters here and that's again separate from an option filter these are scanning against the underlying stocks then after you do that you can go in and scan the actual Options filter for actual option criteria and you know you can choose whatever is available in this list here to actually scan for specific types of options so I hope that helps like I said check us out on thinkorswim net and feel free to contact me if you have any questions thanks again for watching and we'll talk to you soon

Channel: Easycators

Views: 27,058

Rating: 4.5679998 out of 5

Keywords: thinkorswim, think-or-swim, think or swim, td ameritrade, trading, options, stocks, futures, forex, thinkscript, ameritrade, tda, tos, options hacker, options scanning, option scanning, stock hacker, spread hacker, options scan, options scans, options scanner, options scanners, option scan, option scans, option scanner, option scanners, stock options, thinkorswim options, thinkorswim option, trade options, thinkorswim tutorial, think or swim tutorial, think-or-swim tutorial, traders

Id: 6gjVJQ75Gl8

Length: 10min 1sec (601 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 01 2017