so what are flexible and non flexible grids in thinkorswim in this video I'm
going to show you how to set both of those up so you can have your charts
exactly how you want it hey how's it going on this channel you will learn the
steps I took to go from trading with a full time job to trading as a full time
job so if you're new here consider subscribing and today we're going into
the grid system and thinkorswim so for those of you who don't know where the
flexible grid tab is it'll be in your charge tab and then in the next level of
tabs there will be flexible grid right there now the whole idea of flexible
grids is that you can have grids that are different sizes so if you want to
have maybe your main chart be a 10-minute chart and then you have a
bunch of smaller charts that show you maybe larger time frames or just
something else you have that's a part of your trading plan flexible grid is where
you're gonna do that so what you're gonna want to do first when you set this
up is you're gonna want to link most of these charts at least that's how I
generally do it I will have the flexible grid be about 1 stock you could have it
be maybe your top this larger chart up here be the asset you're trading maybe
just a stock that you're trading and then the bottom charts could be maybe
other assets such as maybe the stock market SP 500 the Nasdaq and maybe the
Dow if you're wanting to track the market as it moves and seeing how that
affects the stock that you're wanting to actually trade but how I like to do it
is I like to link them all because I like to maybe use the flexible grid to
scan a bunch of different time frames at the same time I'm looking for a entry
point or a certain set up throughout those time frames so first I'm going to
go here and click this chain and this is how you can link the charts together so
if you click one of these colors and go to all four of these and link them all
to the same color all I have to do is go to any one of the
linked charts and type in a indicator that I'm wanting to look at so I'm just
gonna bring up the market futures and see you can see it populate all of the
chart now these buttons in the center right here what these do is they can
either add a chart below it add a chart to the side of it or remove a chart and
so you're gonna have to link it up again once you make those new charts and then
this button right here creates a sidebar and that'll remove the sidebar that
usually has these time and sales down here you can see that it'll remove that
if you don't want that on all of your charts once you have as many charts as
you want and you don't want this add chart button in here anymore
you go up to these kind of Rubik's Cube up here and unclick the customize grid
button and that'll get rid of that other than that these act just about the same
as any chart you have all of the different settings you can do to the
charts and you can change them all to different time frames so up here I can
have a daily chart and then down here I could have different timeframe charts
maybe if I wanted a weekly chart down here a monthly chart down here and then
maybe a 15-minute chart down here to look at smaller timeframes and larger
timeframes at the same time while I'm really basing most of my trades off of a
daily chart up here one thing to help you set up the charts exactly how you
want it might help to zoom in on just one chart at a time and so how you do
that is right click and click maximize cell and that will just zoom into that
one chart and maybe you can mess around with the settings a little bit easier or
maybe draw patterns on it a little bit better and then zoom it back out to just
have it show that pattern but not have to have it as a huge chart taking up the
whole screen it's just a small chart in the corner but it still shows that
important pattern that maybe you're wanting to trade a feature that pops up
when you zoom in is you can scroll between the cells without zooming out so
you can just go up here top right and click the left or right
arrow and then I'll take you to the next cell in the grid setup and so you can
just scroll through them and change them how you want and then to get back out
you just right click and click restore cells and that'll zoom back out to the
grid setup you had before another setup you could do is actually just have the
one chart but if you wanted to have let's say a active trader tab down here
without the chart and then maybe some few other tabs such as a level two or
some news that's another thing you can do you can take the charts out of here
and have more of data or trade entry tabs below the chart this kind of setup
would definitely be more of a day trading or really active trader setup
most of the time I'm just looking at charts with idea that you're not trading
very often you're more of just planning and scouting for really good trades and
then putting trades in every few days or even every few weeks so other than the
flexible grid setup in the normal charts tab there's a grid setup that is the one
I normally use so I'm gonna go back to the charts tab and this is where you can
create the same kind of grids like the last one but they're not flexible you
can't have a huge one on top and then maybe three small ones on the bottom
they're all going to be squares and be the exact same size but the idea is that
you can still set them up to be really useful and be really efficient with your
charting setup once you have it set up so how to do that is at the top right
here you will have this square and this right now just shows that we have the
one chart if we click on this it'll come up with essentially a grid and you can
make as many charts as you want you can make a huge number of charts I don't
normally do this because that's way too many charts to have on one time you
can't really see anything but depending on how you want to trade in your setup
you could definitely be using a lot generally I will use maybe five to seven
but another general setup you can have is maybe just two or three but are
really easy to compare and watch how I like to use
the grid setup and what I think it's most powerful for is having at least
five charts on there with the idea that once you link them all up you can then
go in and set them up to be different time frames with the leftmost chart
being a smaller time frame such as a 10-minute chart and then all the way on
the right being maybe a daily or a weekly chart allowing you to once you
zoom in just flip through timeframes really easily without changing how your
setup is but let me show you how I set that up so first we're going to zoom in
on the leftmost chart and I'm going to change it to a 15-minute chart because
that's the lowest timeframe that I want to look at now maybe I want to change
this to being a 15-minute chart but only look at the last day so I can really see
what the chart is doing over just today and then I can go into settings and
maybe overlap volume and just apply other settings that you like now next I
will click the arrow that goes to the next chart and change that to a
30-minute chart and set this one up exactly how I want it and then I'd go to
the next chart after that and just slowly incrementally increase the time
so this would be a one-hour chart I'd set it up exactly how I wanted it put
the studies on I'd go to the next one set it up to a 4-hour chart okay exactly
how I want and so with this chart setup because all the charts are now linked I
can just change it to any stock that I want to look at so if I just want to
look at Apple I can look at it on a daily chart see that it's doing really
good on a daily chart and then maybe zoom in on different time frames and see
how I think the chart is doing and if this is a chart setup that I want to
trade so here's my grid setup and I'm gonna use it to show you maybe what a
finished product would look like and what you can do with it once it's done
so once you have all of your settings exactly how you want because all these
charts are linked I can go to a larger timeframe and maybe
draw larger resistance levels and with this chart setup I can zoom in and see
those same drawings as well as look at what the chart is doing on a more
shorter timeframe but I always think it is important as i zoom out here to
understand what the chart is doing at all different timeframes because if you
get sucked into maybe a just a shorter time frame without understanding the
larger picture that you can really get trapped and potentially get hit by a bus
that would be really obvious if you were in a larger time frame now this grid
setup I have eight different charts going all the way from a 15 minute to a
weekly chart and this just allows me to easily scan and look at the chart at
different timeframes because it really gives you a lot of insight into what the
stock is doing another example of how I use a grid setup is I have just eight
charts next to each other allowing me to look at a lot of different things at
once and so this setup right here is my more marketwatch setup and what it does
is it watches the markets more on a daily or intraday timeframe and all
these charts here are just either the sp500 the Nasdaq or market internal
indicators that give you a lot of insight into what is happening in the
market hey thanks for checking out this video if you want to learn more about
the thinkorswim platform or trading it in the stock market make sure to
subscribe to the channel and as always leave any comments or questions down
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