So how do you use the basic thinkorswim platform to read stop charts in this
video I'm gonna walk you through what I consider to be the best charting
software there is out there and on top of that it's free hey how's it going on
this channel you will learn the steps I took to go from trading with a full time
job you're trading as a full time job so if you're new here consider subscribing
and today we're going over the think or swim platform so for those who don't
know the thinkorswim platform is through the brokerage platform TD Ameritrade and
the whole you have to do to get this software is just open an account then
you don't have to pay any fees or subscriptions for the platform and you
actually don't have to deposit any money so you can have a an account with
nothing in it and use this platform if you're at all serious about getting into
stock trading I would suggest get on this platform as soon as possible and
get familiar with it because you will want to use this platform as much as
possible and not have to get used to it once you start trading after you've been
maybe using a easier web-based platform for a while so when you first open that
platform it should look relatively like this and this will be the home screen
which just gives you basic info about either trades or just your account and
what you have going on and then on the sides you will have other information
which is right now it has watch lists on the side which is basically a list of
stocks that you have made that you essentially want to watch or look out
for and you can remove these side tabs by just clicking on these buttons you
will spend most of your time up here in this row of tabs and you have the
monitor tab which will give you a more detailed description of your active
trades or positions you have and then if you actually want to make a trade you go
to the trade tab and what you do up here is you would
type in the symbol of the stock you want to trade so let's say let's trade Amazon
and what that does is then that brings up the current price of Amazon and the
net change for the day and as well down here you have a options chain which is
just a different asset you can trade on Amazon but how to make a simple buy or
sell entry you go up here and click on either the ask if you want to buy or the
bid if you want to sell and so if we click on the ask down here you can see
it brings up a buy order and so what this says is we are buying stock we are
buying it this says a hundred shares it'll default to a hundred shares but we
can go down here and change it and it'll actually looks like it changes by
increments of a hundred so if I just wanted to buy one because Amazon is
pretty expensive at $1,900 a share right now and then if we go along here it says
to open because we are initiating this order
we don't have any shares of Amazon right now so we need to open and that's just a
technical term or essentially just buying a new position and then it says
we're buying Amazon type stock and then this is the actual price down here that
we would be buying it at and this is a set for a limit order and that means
that we are buying it at this price so we can lock in that price if we don't
want it to change based on the changing price of Amazon but if we haven't
unlocked it sticks to the ask price of Amazon and so we can then change this to
however we want if we want to buy it as a certain price and then over here it
says the day and that is how long the order will be open for so if we have
this at a price that's really low below the market that no one's gonna fill us
at like let's say 500 no one's gonna fill us at $500 because that's well
below the current price of Amazon no one's gonna sell you one share of Amazon
for $500 when it's almost worth dollars they would be locking in a huge
loss on their part moving on we have how long the order is gonna last and so
right now says day and that means that if this order doesn't get filled within
the day it'll cancel and close itself automatically if you want to have a buy
order open for maybe a whole week and see if Amazon pulls back to that
price let's say you have the buy order at 1800 and you think Amazon's gonna
fall a hundred dollars in the next week you can have that at good till cancel or
GTC and that will essentially have that order open until you cancel it and then
exchange that means that it will go to the best exchange possible and that will
just get you essentially the best fill and the fastest fill possible to
actually send the order you would click confirm and send and it brings up here
that we want to buy one Amazon at $500 good till cancel it says it'll cost five
hundred and five dollars and that's because buying stock you do have a
transaction fee to the broker of five dollars to send that order in we would
go ahead and click send order and that sends our ordering up here you can see
it says I got rejected because I don't have enough cash or buying power in this
account to buy and pay for that one share but if you did you could go into
your monitor tab and under working orders here it would show that you had
one order open for a share of Amazon at $500 good till cancel and then once that
order got filled it would show in the filled orders down here and it would
also show up down here in your positions and that's where you could track your
P&L or your profit loss for that position or one share of Amazon that you
purchased but most your time you will be spending in the charts tab up here and
this is where we can see the charts and price action of all the stocks that we
either want to trade or just keep track of right now up here on the left you can
see that based on this ticker symbol or the symbol associated with the
stock Amazon is still on here and right here you can see the current price of
Amazon and then the price change for the day and that doesn't matter on what
timeframe of chart you're looking it'll always say how much change happened this
day for Amazon to quickly show you how to just move the charts around and zoom
in when you want to do that if you want to zoom in the easiest way is to click
it with your left mouse and drag on a section you want to zoom in so if I
wanted to zoom in on this section I would click and drag this box over and
it would zoom me in if I wanted to zoom back out I would right click and click
Auto zoom and that resets it to the two day time frame that this chart is set at
another way to do it is go down here and click and drag on these two axes the X
and y axis and that'll zoom and also stretch the y axis also if you click
ctrl while dragging on the axis it will move them around instead of expanding or
contracting them and that's just another way to manipulate the chart into fitting
on your screen exactly how you want it to
right now this chart is only showing the open trading market hours and what those
hours are are 9:30 Eastern Time - or Eastern Time if you want the extended
hour session or if your chart is showing the extend our session and you want it
off you go up here to this little gear which is the Settings button and we
would go over to equities because we are in stocks right now and those are
equities and then we would go down here and show extended hours or if you don't
want them you click that off and then hit OK and then we can see that this
shows the extended hours which is this lighter shade of black down here
compared to the straight up black color of the open market
hours down here these blue lines down here is volume and so if you're never
sure what you're looking at the volume bars will always be a lot larger in the
actual open training hours of the day because 99% of the volume happens in the
open market hours we can zoom out again because this is showing more data now
because we have the extended hours on it but you can see that in these after
hours that the market will still be a lot more jumpy and all over the place
without candles that look a lot more defined going back into the settings
just to show you a few other things this is just your general settings this is
where you would overlap the volume and so if we wanted to take that off the
chart and have it in its own section we could hit apply and you can see that
down here it puts it in its own little graph but I like to have this on the
chart because it blends in really well and it makes it so the chart doesn't
take up more space another thing I would suggest is going to snap to drawings and
putting ohlc on here and what that does is your
drawings will snap to the candlestick wicks or bars this allows you to draw
lines really easily of either trends highs or Fibonacci levels I suggest just
going through a lot of these and looking through and playing with the different
settings because you can really change these charts to how you want them to
look and this time axis this is where we could change the chart time and
candlestick size so if we wanted a 10 minute candle and over a five day chart
this is where we can change that I'm gonna go in here and change the
after-hours off again because during when you're looking at stocks you really
don't need those after our data because 99% of the trading happens in the open
market hours we're just gonna go ahead and click OK and that should adjust the
chart to the new settings of 5 days with minute candles another quick way to
change the time frame is actually right here next to the gears you have your
favorites and so this is just basic ones that they give you right off the bat
that are in the platform but these are generally really good hours if we wanted
to change it to a daily chart or a more long-term trading this shows a year
worth of data with each candle being a day and if we wanted to zoom in on the
chart we could do that and maybe look at a certain section a little bit more
closely down here you can see the it has the earnings reports and so this is just
where you can see that this is where previous earnings were if we scroll to
the right we can see this is where the next earnings date will be and it says
that they are reported on this day after market hours some will report the for
market hours so if you're close to earnings make sure to look at that next
over here we have drawings and if we go down here to drawing tools there are a
ton of different drawings right now we have a channel selected and so if we
just select that again just to make sure you have it you can go on to the chart
and click where you would want to draw the candle and since we have that snap
to the candlestick wick selected it'll easily snap to the exact lo of that
candle and then we can draw the channel that we're maybe looking for and so this
will first draw the bottom part of the channel and so that looks like a good
support line and then we would click again and that will make the other
parallel line that we can use for the other side of the channel
and we'll put that exactly around here because that looks like good Channel or
Amazon and then click again and that will show you the channel and we can use
this then to buy or sell and just trade Amazon every few days based on this
channel if you want to edit this you can go into edit properties and you can
change a lot of different things either the label or the name you can make the
lines extend forever you can change the color you can change the width
size of it and can also save your settings as a default so if you want
something to look different or be a different way every time it'll do that
if we wanted to go back and get another drawing we can and just to demonstrate
the snap to level you can see that here it will snap to this high without having
to draw it perfectly and that makes it so you can draw resistance levels really
easily without having to eyeball them and type in the exact price on the
drawing editor to get rid of these drawings we can either right-click them
and remove drawing well we can just right click anywhere on the chart and
clear drawing set if we want to remove all the drawings on the chart and just
get a clean slate so if you want to have studies on your chart we would go to the
studies tab and you can do quick studies and either find the study in here if you
want or you can go to edit studies which is what I usually do because you can
then go in here and search for the study you want so let's search for a simple
moving average and we can put that on the chart and then if you right click on
here and click Edit properties we can go in and edit the moving average so we can
change it to a 10 simple day moving average we can change the color the
length what it looks like there's a lot of different editing you can do and I
know this is a ton of information at one time but that's why I think you should
start soon working with this platform and get familiar with it because it is a
lot of work and pretty overwhelming at the start so if we go ahead and apply
this you can see that it is now on our chart here and that we have that simple
moving average and if we wanted to use that to trade we could so a really
awesome thing about thinkorswim is if you have a chart setup that you want
every time and you move it around between different charts you can go up
to studies again and let's just put another
studying here so we can have a better example so let's say we use this setup
for our trading plane and we want to save this so then you can go in and save
as study set and let's just say this as simple trading plan this is something we
could load up every time so if we wanted to quickly load this up and we didn't
have any of these studies on we could go in here and click load study and you can
see that we have that simple trading plan here and if we click that it would
then load it on this chart and override anything we already had hey thanks for
trying on this video if you want to learn more about the thinkorswim
platform check out this playlist I have right here and if you just want to learn
more about trading make sure to subscribe to the channel as always leave
any comments or questions below and if you liked this video make sure to give
it a thumbs up