hey what's going on everyone thanks for checking out this video this is Travis
from Master the Market and i wanted to make a quick video to talk a little bit
about scanning for day trading setups here in the thinkorswim platform with td ameritrade
so before we get into the scans themselves i want to say that even though i'm using thinkorswim
pretty much any scanner is going to have similar criteria that you can plug in so
if you're using something like etrade pro or you know a paid option like trade ideas or equity feed
or really anything along those lines you're going to be able to apply pretty much the same criteria
and set up the same custom scans with those as well so first and foremost what you do to
create a scan in thinkorswim is go up here to the scan tab and from there what you're going
to want to do is click on this little icon here followed by load and create scan query
and after that all you're going to have to do is put in the criteria that i'm going to show
you here in just a moment and this is already a scanner that i have created so i'm going to
go ahead and load this up and the first one that i want to talk about is a low float scanner so this
is looking for stocks that have a limited amount of shares to actually trade and you can think of
that as the supply for the stock and you can think of the volume as the demand and stocks with a low
supply or in other words a low amount of shares available to be traded in a high amount of volume
or a high amount of demand are going to be the stocks that have the biggest potential for a huge
run so anytime you see a stock that's spiking up you know maybe 100 or 200 percent even 500
or more in a short period of time whether that be one day or you know a couple days or even a week
more often than not those are going to be stocks that have a low number of outstanding shares
because in its simplest form what that is is a low amount of supply
so really all this scan is looking for is first anything in the 1 to 20 dollars per share range
now this is completely preference honestly i like to trade stocks in this range uh but if you prefer
to trade stocks maybe below one dollar per share or if you're somebody that trades higher price
stocks and you want to focus on twenty dollars and up you can of course change these settings
to fit your personal preferences uh but after that you're going to want to put in volume and you want
the minimum volume to be at least 100 000 shares and in my opinion this should be pretty much the
bare minimum because anything below 100 000 shares is going to be a very limited amount of liquidity
and that's going to cause a lot of problems with your trading because
as you know there has to be somebody on the other side of your trade so when you buy there has to
be somebody to sell you those shares and vice versa when you sell there has to be somebody
to buy those shares from you and when there's a very small amount of volume in a specific stock
more often than not you're going to have trouble finding somebody on the other side of the trade
so 100 000 shares is the bare minimum and to be a little bit more picky you can even boost this up
to you know 200 000 shares or even up to 500 000 or more shares now the next thing is going to be
the number of shares and again this is going back to the supply for the stock we want this to be a
pretty low amount of supply because we want to look for stocks with a lot of volatility and the
ones that have the biggest potential for a huge spike in the near future so because of that i like
to put the maximum amount of shares outstanding at 20 million shares anything below that is going
to be considered pretty low and again these are the ones with potential for a lot of volatility
in the fourth and final study that we have down here we're looking for unusual volume so we want
the current day's volume to be at least 50 percent greater than what it typically is
over the past 30 periods and you can go ahead and select any period so you know if you want to look
over the past 30 minutes you would have 30 periods selected but the period is representing one minute
um you can also have 30 periods selected but that can be 35 minute periods but in this case we're
looking for volume to be at least 50 percent greater than it is for an entire day over the
past 30 periods so now not only are we looking for stocks with a limited amount of shares in a
limited supply but we're also looking for stocks that are trading unusually large volume and more
often than not these are two things that you're going to see with pretty much every single big
runner in the stock market so if we go ahead then and click on scan you can see that we get our list
of stocks meeting this criteria and from there you would obviously want to narrow this down a
little bit further and maybe look for stocks that have some kind of news or press release or some
kind of upcoming news or press release and then potentially look to take a trade based off of that
okay so the other scan that i want to talk about is a very simple one
and this is actually going to be pretty much just my idea of a top percent gainer scan
with just a few tweaks because i like to be a little bit more specific with my scans than just
a general top percent gainers so in this case i have stocks anywhere between 10 cents per share
all the way up to actually no maximum so anything above 10 cents per share is going to fit into this
scanner now because we're looking for stocks that are spiking up and they already have some kind of
gain i'm gonna go ahead and boost this minimum percent change up to just two percent i'm going
to show you how to actually arrange these so that way you're looking at the biggest gainers
but then the last thing that we have down here is just volume again at a minimum of 100 000 shares
and all you have to do then is click on scan again and this is going to give you the largest percent
gainers now the way that you have this listed from the top percent gainers down is just make sure
that you click on percent change up here at the top um and it's going to maybe first list them as
the smallest gainers up to the largest gainers but you want to have the largest gainers up at the top
so if you click on that again it's going to do just that and again this is pretty much just
a top percent gainer scan just in this case we're looking for a minimum amount of shares
so that's going to remove the stocks that are only trading a couple thousand shares here and there
and also because i'm a little bit picky and i don't want to trade stocks below 10 cents per
share it's also factoring that in and removing those stocks from the scan and believe it or
not these two very simple scanners are pretty much the only ones that i use for my intraday scanning
for the most part i trade a lot of stocks that are here on the top percent gainers list because these
are stocks that more often than not have some kind of news or press release that was very recently
released on top of that they usually have a lot of volume which is associated with that news or press
release and they also have a lot of volatility and generally speaking when it comes to day trading
the two things that you want to see are volatility and volume so now that we have the scans
themselves covered i want to actually give you a few tips to actually use this sidebar over here so
that way you can look at your scans in real time while you're doing your trading and while you're
analyzing charts without having to switch back between you know the trade tab and the chart tab
as well as the scan tab that we're on right now so one thing that many people don't know is that over
here on the sidebar you can click on this plus button down here to actually add a watch list and
in that watch list it's going to have a default watch list saved in there but you can actually add
in any of your scanners that you created and saved right here on the scan tab so what you're going to
want to do is click on this default scanner that it has pulled up and from there you're going to
go to personal and anything under personal is a scanner that you created on your own and saved
so just a reminder to actually save this scanner after you put in this criteria um and all you have
to do is click on the same button up here that you clicked on to make the scanner in the first place
and then go ahead and save that so that way you're not going to have to put in this criteria
every time you open the platform back up and on top of that it's going to be saved so that way
you can open it up over here on the sidebar and it's going to show up under personal uh so for
example if we go ahead and take this top percent gainers one that we just talked about a moment ago
and you can see that now we have this pulled up over here on the sidebar now one thing that i
don't like by default about these scanners and watch lists over here on the sidebar is the way
that they're arranged so i'm going to click on this little settings icon to the right of the
ask and i'm going to go ahead and customize this now i personally like to focus on the percent
change rather than the net change so i'm going to go ahead and remove that as well as the bid
and the ask and instead i'm going to go ahead and add the percent change as well as the volume
and then i'm going to go ahead and click on ok and you can see that now our scanner is going
to show us the symbol it's going to show us the last price that the stock traded at it's going
to show us the percent change and last but not least it's going to show us the volume over here
so again this is very useful if you are you know doing some trading or chart analysis and you want
to keep an eye on your scanners at the same time without having to switch between these two tabs
now another really cool thing is that you can actually go ahead and widen this sidebar out a bit
you can actually link all of these different tools together which is really going to help
you save a lot of time when doing your analysis and when looking for some trade setup so if we go
ahead and set these all to yellow or number two under this little link feature on these tools
now anytime a stock pops up on our watch list or on our scanner
if we click on that stock you can see it's also going to pull up a quick chart
and it's also going to pull up the most recent news for that stock so if you wanted to read the
news and see what is causing the stock to spike up you just click on it and it's going to have
that article right there pop up for you to read so the last thing that i want to talk about is a
way for you to actually narrow down the stocks that are pulling up on your scanners to a much
smaller list that you're going to be able to put a little bit more of your attention into
uh so to narrow that down even further you can go ahead over here to the sidebar and add in another
watch list and this time we're going to go ahead on default and create watch list and just go ahead
and give it any kind of name i'm going to go ahead and call this november 2nd watch list and
all you have to do is add in any symbols that were popping up on your scanner that you think
are going to be a potential day trade in the near future so uh we'll just take this example here sup
uh we'll take e i g i
we'll add dgly
and let's take acor and then go ahead and click on save and again just like we did
up here you can also adjust the columns to have the last price the percent change
and the volume instead of the net change the bid and the ask and now not only do you have your
scanners over here on the sidebar but you have a more narrowed down list of the best stocks that
are actually hitting that scanner and for me i think that's a really great way to kind of narrow
down your scans and to have a readily available list of the stocks that you're looking to trade
so anyway i hope you found this video helpful and let me know if you try out these scans
and how they work out for you if you're interested in learning how to day trade swing trade or even
long term invest you can find more information on that at my website master the market which
will be the first website link down below in the description and if you enjoyed the video please
make sure to give it a like and subscribe to the channel so you don't miss out on future videos
but anyway thank you again for watching i hope you enjoyed and good luck with your trading
you