So how do you quickly scan for stocks in the thinkorswim platform in this video
I'm gonna walk you through how to set up and find perfect stocks that match your
trading 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 learning has scan for stocks in
thinkorswim so we get to the scan tab it's gonna be
at the top here by the analyze and market watch tab we're just gonna click
on the scan tab and then if it doesn't automatically go to you want to go to
the stock hacker part of it because that is where we're gonna be scanning for
actual stocks these other things can scan for actual options and then spreads
and just a lot of different features that we're not going to go into in this
video one quick thing if you don't want to make a scan yourself if you go all
the way to the right over here there is this little drop down menu and you can
load scans that are already here and so this is where you will you can save your
scans and reload them if you made personal scans you can see here I have
some scans but there's also ones that are already made for you so there's
public ones you can see here you can look at stocks that you know gapped down
gapped up so these are different scans you can put in without having to make
them yourself so if you're looking to make something I would look in here and
see if it's already here there are just pretty basic ones in here but you know
some times a lot of people do like to look up for gap stocks or a kind of
momentum trade with those and these are definitely ones you could look at so
just to load that up you just click it and then click scan and then this would
load stocks that have gapped up and so looking at this you can see that all
these stocks here just searching it by percent change all these stocks here
have gapped up in the morning and then not all of them have done amazing but
there have definitely been a few here that have done really well one setting
you want to definitely make sure the is right is up here when it says scan
you want to make sure you are in if you're looking for stocks you want to
scan all stocks now you can see here you can scan a lot of different things you
can scan you know different categories and other preset categories that they
have already for you and you want to make sure it's in the right category
that you're scanning for otherwise you're gonna get symbols that you don't
want or it just might not work at all so we want to make sure we're in all
stocks and then you can leave this blank and then to actually make our own I'm
just going to delete these you have these three different kind of filters up
here you can add so you have AB filters for stocks and so this is gonna make
more of a filter for the actual stock so what this is we can click an add it and
this will be something for the actual stock so we can look at one thing right
here you can scan for a certain market cap size of a stock so if you want to
trade stocks that are only above a certain market cap or below a certain
market cap like if you want to trade penny stocks this is a way to search for
that or you can do another one I like to do is actual value m-- and so this is a
way you can scan for stocks that have a high amount of volume because you really
don't want to be trading stocks that are you know trading one share a day or two
shares five shares you know 100 you want to be trading stocks that are trading
above a few hundred thousand shares a day because otherwise you're gonna have
liquidity issues and all that is is that if you're trading a stock that's only
trading a hundred shares a day and you buy 50 shares you're gonna have a hard
time selling those 50 shares when you want them without making the price of
the stock move dramatically and so that's an extreme example but that's the
main reason why you want there to be a lot of volume so you can sell a stock at
a fair price whenever you want you don't have to think about the fact that the
stock could be bouncing around all over the place when you see when the stock
has a low trading volume now if you don't really know what I'm talking about
I suggest just go in here and scanning for stocks that are trading
at you know less than a hundred thousand chairs a day and you'll see on the chart
the stock will be bouncing all over the place and that's definitely not what you
want to be trading so this is just a good way to try and get you know make
sure your trading solid stocks another one you could do is market cap now
that's just another one to make sure that you know if you're wanting to trade
the larger stocks you can put in market cap here you don't have to if you're
wanting to trade penny stocks or just small our stocks you can leave this as a
smaller number but here you could set it to you know I want to trade a stock that
is larger than a billion and that'll weed out a lot of small stocks that you
probably don't want to be trading because those things can have crazy
out-of-the-blue moves if a large fund or someone decides to dump a bunch of money
in them or sell a bunch of them because they're valued so small they might move
really quickly there are a ton of different options in here and I'll let
you look through that on your own time now another one here we have is options
you can filter for what's happening in there options now this is just a way to
you know look for something has a large implied volatility so if maybe options
are super expensive and you're wanting to sell premium for those this is a good
way to scan for that now the next one on this one is the ad
studies and so this is definitely probably where you're going to using the
most with the stock filter this is where you will add your studies and different
indicators that you use to narrow down a stock for your trading plan so if we
wanted to just as a basic example let's say we just wanted to find a stock that
is trading above the you know the 10 day moving average right and so what we're
gonna do is going to go to popular studies and then moving average scan and
so this will allow us to do any type of moving average you can see it brings up
this bar here and then over here what says the type we can change it to
whatever we want so we can do simple and then we'll do 10 day moving average and
then here is percent above this is so this would be
you last bar or the close of the last bar is at least 10 percent above the
10-day simple moving average so this would be a way to scan for stocks that
are really far away from their 10-day moving average 10 percent we won't find
many stocks that are that far away from their 10 day moving average just because
this is a quick moving average and then over here all the way on the right you
want to make sure that this is set to the timeframe you want so right now it's
on day and you can see it you can change it to a lot of different intervals now
you can't change it to any other intervals than this these are the only
intervals that you can scan for so if this is just what we were looking for we
can then scan and see that this brings up a few and so it makes sense that this
is bringing up a few stocks that I've had a huge move today because they're
gonna be stocks that are very far away from their 10 day moving average because
just today this stock alone has moved up 30% now the last kind of filter you can
add is the fundamentals filter and so this will be for more fundamentals of
the stock so if you're more into you know fundamentals investing or trading
using fundamental numbers this is gonna be where you will find all of those so
you can see there are a ton of different fundamental categories in here and I
haven't personally used these I trade with more technicals but if you're
wanting to look for it just about anything in here it looks like there's
you know almost 40 or 50 in here you're definitely gonna find probably what
you're looking for in there so lastly to save this you can save these two
watchlist so right here on above where our search results are on the right you
can click Save to watch list and then you can just put in you know whatever
name you want right and then this saves this and then over here where I have
watch lists I can go to personal and then that is going to be saved in here
so let's see where that is simple watchlist and then that is going to be
where you can see where these stocks are and then a nice thing is
I can go to charts and then quickly if I link these two you can see let yours
might have no links here so this little link here I can link these charts so I
can click and have this to be just the same color you want to make sure they're
the same color and that'll link the charts and then all you have to do is
click on the stocks in this watchlist and they will automatically go on the
chart so you don't have to be looking at this scan that we had before and then
going back to the chart and typing in the symbol if you have just this
watchlist over here you can quickly look through these and then see if they were
our stock that you really want to trade now last thing as well is the top right
above your scan this is where you can save scans so you can save in here so
this is going to actually save to the gap up I don't want to do that I just
want to save this as you know a simple scan and then that will put it in where
I can load and that'll put it in my personal and so this is where I can then
click simple scan and it will load that up for me and then I can quickly scan
that again if I want to do that so thanks for trying this video if you
wanna learn more about the thinkorswim platform make sure to check out this
playlist on thinkorswim right there now if you want to just learn more about
trading and the market in general make sure to subscribe to the channel if you
have any questions don't hesitate to ask them in your comments below