The Monitor tab allows you to view and manage
orders and positions as well as view your account statements.
Let's take a quick look at the Monitor tab
and examine some of the features and benefits.
All right.
So starting here on the Home screen,
we're going to navigate to the Monitor tab.
So on the Monitor tab, we have four subtabs.
First, we have the Activity and Positions,
which allows us to track our orders
and keep an eye on things that are pertinent to existing
positions.
We have the Account Statement, which
allows us to track historical information relating
to our accounts.
And we have FX Reports and Strategy Roller.
The first two tabs actually appear by default.
The second two--
FX Reports appears if we have forex approval,
and Strategy Roller appears once we have options approval.
All right.
So let's spend a little bit more time
on the Activity and Positions.
A really common reason to visit the Monitor tab
is to manage your equity orders.
So open orders, such as a stop order or a limit order,
can be found here under working orders.
Now, in this example portfolio, we actually
have a working order.
This is a limit order to buy 10 shares of Home Depot for $315.
Now, this function actually allows
us to update those orders or to change them
as we see necessary.
So let me just walk through how we might change this limit
order to, let's say, a market order
to buy those shares of Home Depot.
So to make that change, all I do is come down to that green bar
anywhere on that Order bar.
I'm going to right click, and I'm
going to select Cancel and Replace Order from the menu.
Once I click on Cancel and Replace,
it takes us right to the Trade tab,
and it brings up our original order
as originally constructed.
So here's our order to buy 10 shares of Home
Depot with a $315 limit.
And I'm just going to change that to a market order.
And let's click Confirm and Send.
This gives us our Order Confirmation dialog box
that allows us to double check that this is really
what we want to do.
In this case, we're buying 10 shares of Home Depot
at the current market price.
And I'm going to send that order off.
And as I send it, we should see a pop-up that confirms
that the order has filled.
And there it is.
We just bought our 10 shares of Home Depot for $323.25.
Now, another reason to use the Monitor tab
is to manage your current position.
So let's go back to that monitor page and look at our positions
down in the Unallocated field.
A couple of important features that I
might want to highlight here-- number one
is the column titled Quantity.
And this shows us how many shares we own of each stock,
or if these were options, it would show us
how many contracts we have on the underlying.
As I go to that Quantity column, another feature of this column
is that I can click directly on the quantity.
And that shows us the original cost basis for that trade.
So for this example, let's use the 10 shares
that we just bought of Home Depot.
If I click on that quantity, plus 10,
I can see the trade time, and I can
see the trade price, $323.25.
So in addition to tracking the quantity
and the original purchase price of trades
or the original cost basis of trades,
we can also track a number of other characteristics
of the trade that might be important to the investor.
For example, we can see the current mark or market
price of a stock or an option that we've traded.
We can see how that market price has changed for the day.
We can see the profit or loss since we opened the trade,
and we can see the profit or loss just for the day.
Now, before we leave Activity and Positions,
let me show how we might place an order to close a trade.
And I'm going to stick with Home Depot.
Let's say that we were done with our Home Depot.
We're ready to sell.
We can actually go right to the symbol for Home Depot
and right click directly on it and create a closing order
from the pop-up menu.
For this example, we'll select the top item in the menu
to the right--
sell 10 Home Depot, $323.29 limit.
As I select that, it takes us right to our Trade tab.
And let's send this off as a market order.
So I'm going to change this limit order to a market order
and click Confirm and Send.
And on our Order Confirmation dialog box,
I do want to make the note transaction fees can
be a consideration with some order types.
Not in this case.
I'm going to send this order off,
and we're now out of those shares of Home Depot.
Sold for $323.34.
All right.
Now that we're done with that trade,
let's go back to our Monitor tab.
And we're going to go to that second subtab, the account
statement.
And as I mentioned, this is where
we can retrieve historical data relating to our positions.
This tool allows users to follow their trades, deposits,
withdrawals, and more.
So let's open that Cash and Sweep Vehicle.
The Sweep Vehicle also helps keep money
working by putting your dividends
and interest payments into a money market account
until you decide to invest them.
All right.
We've covered a lot of information
in the space of just a few minutes,
so now it's a great time to go and explore
these new tools on thinkorswim for yourself.