So how do you use the active trader tab in thinkorswim in this video you're
gonna learn everything you need to know so you can effectively use with this
feature hey how's it going on this channel you will learn the steps it
takes to make a full time income trading in the stock market so if you're new
here consider subscribing and today we're talking about the active trader
tab in thinkorswim so if you don't know where the active trader tab is it's in
the charts so if you're just in charts it's gonna be on these tabs on the side
so all the way on the right here and you will see active trader and clicking that
will bring up the active trader window now the first few basic things it has in
here is you can buy and sell right at the market so you don't even have to
worry about a price you can just say that I want to buy in right away if we
click on this it'll just instantly fill us at this price and then we can say
sell out market or we can reverse if we want to just instantly short that
position that we just made long and then if we wanted to close that position
without selling at you know if we had a bunch of different weird positions open
and you just want it to flatten that's what this button is it just closes all
your trades and so if we click flatten that just closes everything that we have
so you don't have to think about oh if I'm sure I need a buy or if I'm long
this money I need to sell this many it just closes them all out for you without
you having to think so that's really nice a few things you'll notice this
little drop-down arrow you can change the quantity of either shares or four in
this case futures contracts your trading so you know they have a few quick ones
here but you can also just type in you know a number in here that you want so
if you were trying to buy a certain amount of shares or just trade a certain
amount of size of whatever kind of asset you're trading this is how you want to
do that and then over here you have Auto sent and all that does is make it so you
can either quickly sell something and buy something with without having to say
confirm so if I have this auto send unclick and I click buy market it's
gonna bring up a confirmation dialog and then I'm gonna have to click send to
do that now if I just have this auto send on I can just click sell market
right away and it will do that instantly without me having to confirm so that's
the idea of this active trader it's a lot more design for you to make trades
really quickly without having to go through the more steps in there that
they have now here you will see that it has how many positions you have open and
then your average price that you got in so if you're buying shares at different
prices it'll kind of say your average price of getting all those shares
combined and then it'll also tell you your profit loss or the overall trade
and then the day and you can change that by clicking here and say customize and
then that allows you to you know add different things so you can take these
away if you don't want to see those and then you can also add things as well so
if we actually wanted to see those we could add those now there's a few other
different settings you can mess with there's these little tiny gear here and
that actually edits this more active trader tab window here where you can see
the price is moving so this is where you can change that you want to see either
the volume here so that's this and then the buy orders and so you can add
different things so you can actually say one thing one that's kind of cool is you
can add peel open and then so what that'll do is if I buy one share here or
one contract it'll say ok if the contract goes all the way up here I'm up
this much money or if it goes down here I'm down this much money not a good a
quick explanation on what this shows this on the right here this volume that
shows you how much trading volume has happened at each one of those prices so
at this exact price right here about nine thousand contracts have been traded
or if it was a stock nine thousand shares would have been traded and then
you know in the center it's the actual price and then another way to set limit
orders in here instead of using this by market or sell market you can actually
say that you want to do a by stop so it'll default if you if the
price is below it'll do a buy stop so I can click on this and if the price got
up to this point it would send in a market order and I would instantly get
filled now another one if it's below that it would be a limit order and so I
can have this set up to do a limit order down here now you can see that for the
stops it says hold control to use a limit order and so I can change this to
a limit order if I don't want that to be a stop order now on the other side it'll
be a sell limit for shorting and then a sell stop down here so I can tell it to
if it gets to this price down here I want to short the stop and currently
what that would actually do right now is because you can see up here I have one
position long right now it would close my position out and you can see over
here this price is changing that I am currently down about $40 so another way
to just close these is I can click on the actual chart that little X or over
here you can click the X now to move these around really quickly you can
easily do that by clicking and dragging in here and that I'll quickly move those
up so it's a really nice and smooth interactive setup for making these quick
trades now one thing that's really cool about the active trader is that they
have templates so right now I'm on buying or selling a single contract or
share right and so if you click on this template they have different things Osio
orders which is other order cancels other or essentially I can set this to
buy either at this limit or buy at the stop so what this order does well you
can see the market just jumped up a ton what this order did but let me just
input it again so you can see this so what this order does is if it gets up to
here it'll buy it and if it gets down to here it'll buy it as well as the ideas
if the market's exploding here like it is right now we will instantly get
filled without having to chase the stock and or if it comes down here we will be
able to buy to the market at a more safer price so
we can either try to be buying at the Loews instead of buying at the highs so
it's just kind of a different strategy and then the other templates on here are
brackets and so this is a few different brackets and so just this initial one is
trigger with bracket so all this does is it's essentially either a buy order or a
sell order and then it automatically puts in a stop loss and a profit taking
target so what we have here up here you can see that you have these two links
that it's done at and so right now it is one point off or one you know a one
dollar move in so what we have is you can see that here it's a limit order for
the profit target and then for the stop loss it's going to be a stop order so if
we go in here and say buy one and then hopefully get filled on that it'll
instantly fill that and you can see that here we have this stop order to cut our
losses and then the limit order to take our profits and again you can move these
around either on the chart or below or on the active trader and then you can
also see this little gear on the side that means these are linked and so once
one of these gets filled the other order will get cancelled so you don't have to
worry about the other order now another thing you can do is you can actually
move this order around by clicking on the little gear and dragging this so
that's a quick way to kind of change this if you wanted to move that around
as some sort of kind of trailing stop loss that other orders in here are
trigger with two brackets or three brackets now what this does is it's
essentially the same thing but it's just you have more versatility with more
brackets so you can see up here it has three different brackets and you want to
make sure because this one is three you can see it on here it doesn't show that
I can by that is because because I have three
brackets I need three contracts at a minimum so now that you can see up here
each one of these has at least a 1 in it so I will be able to buy let's just
close out of these real quick and then I can buy this and then it will set up the
read if and bracket so this would be you know more of if I wanted to have some
sort of you know buy order and then see I can change these as easily as whenever
at one and you know I have some sort of scale out so let's say I buy here and I
want to sell some here and then sell some up here and then sell the last bit
up here so this is a way you can easily scale out of a trade and not having to
kind of wash the stock this puts it in beforehand you don't have to worry about
watching the chart and doing this yourself you can pre put this in or to
do that for you now going back to this template there's actually a really cool
thing you can do is you can save these so right here you can see I have two
that I've already saved and so if I wanted to save this setup as you know
having it have a stoploss all be at the same and then having those different
profit levels i can set these to what i want and then this little button right
here allows me to save it so I can just save this as 3 3 bracket setup and then
this will allow me to use this every time so I can click on this and you can
see that it's down here a few other quick things I want to go over is this
cancel button right here this will cancel all these you know if I have
these orders here I can just click cancel all and that will close all those
orders for me and then another thing is on the side over here sometimes you will
have it for a stock it'll be zoomed in really far so you will be seen each one
of these increments will be pennies and that it can be way too much for a stock
so just one way to change that is you can zoom out here so you can see that
that change the increments here or I can zoom back
in and then also sometimes the active trader as the stock moves up or down it
for some reason won't follow it's um it'll usually try and keep this centered
but sometimes it'll you know move like this and then you won't see any of the
activity so this button right here will Center it back for you so you can
quickly do that without having to scroll and find where it's at the last thing is
just be aware that I was getting filled instantly on these trades because this
is a simulated account now in the real world in an actual non simulated account
they won't you won't always get filled instantly so especially with limit
orders you won't get filled right away sometimes it'll have to go through that
price for you to get filled and so just be aware when you're using the simulator
versus the actual trader is the simulator will get filled instantly you
can see right now the market is actually closed that's why this isn't moving
anymore I can actually buy and get filled even though the market is closed
so that doesn't really make sense the markets closed but I can still buy and
sell stuff and so just be aware of that when you are trading so I hope you found
this video useful you want to learn more about the thinkorswim platform feel free
to check out my playlist on thinkorswim right here and see if any of those
videos in there will help you now if you want to learn more about the stock
market in general feel free to subscribe to the channel even if any questions
don't hesitate to ask them in the comments below