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Narrator:
Hi, I'm David Brunner. I'm on the trade desk here at Charles Schwab. And today we're going to be taking a look at thinkorswim®—specifically how to customize your charts.
Some common questions that we get on these charts is first off how do we remove this volume subgraph on the bottom? How do we remove these corporate actions, these different lines in the background, such as the grid? And how do we change the appearance of our candlesticks?
So, we're going to take a look at all this within our chart settings.
So, we're going to start by going to the settings gear on the top and go into our Equities header and unchecking Show volume subgraph, unchecking Show corporate actions.
And as we go through these at the end, we're going to Apply and show you how everything looks together.
Next, we're going to switch to our Appearance header. And this is where you can go in and really customize those candlesticks. So, you can see here the border up, the border down color. If you would like the candles filled in or not. Also, that grid that I mentioned is right on the bottom here. If you like having that a little bit of a cleaner look, having that grid taken off, you can do that on the bottom there.
Then we're going to jump into our time axis section. A few things here. We're going to check Keep time zoom, which I'll explain in detail a little bit later. We're going to include an expansion area. As you can see on the right side of our chart, there's really no wiggle room here. The candlestick is pushed all the way up onto the right.
So, we want to add a little bit of space there. So, let's just say for example we have these different preset ones. But I want to go in and type in specifically what I want. So, we're going to do 25 bars. And then these lines as well, that I mentioned, these expiration lines. We can uncheck those, make our chart a little bit cleaner.
So, let's apply these settings, go back to our chart and see how everything looks. You're going to click on Apply and OK.
So now we have a much cleaner and more minimalist chart. But really this is personal preference. So, play around with it. See what settings work best for you.
So now that we've customized our charts, we're going to look at a few more features that are going to be relevant when you're doing your trading on thinkorswim.
So, we're going to go back into our settings gear. And this feature down here is called My Tools.
Let's put it On each chart and Apply. And so, what this is going to do it's essentially going to be shortcut buttons for us which we can then pin see how that was going away. If we just click on that pin, it's going to keep it on the top for us no matter where we put our cursor.
And we're going to have buttons that we can customize here by clicking on this gear.
And we can see in our mind tool section, these are the different preset buttons, which we can go in and customize. So, let's say we want instead of a Trendline, we want to change it to a different drawing tool and we prefer the Price Level. We can put that here. Let's say for example instead of our Text Note, we want to have a study that is quickly accessible.
So, we can go in here and let's pick our DailyHighLow. SimpleMovingAverage is another study. And let's say we want to add another button. You can go on the bottom, left click. And you have that same set of options where let's say we want it to go in our Time Frame section and add a five-day five minute.
We'll click on Done. And we can see these buttons have changed here. For example, right now we're on the daily chart. We click we want to switch to a 5 Minute chart. We click there and we switch.
So, let's talk about zooming and I'll show you that keep time zoom feature. So, we're going to go in here. We're still looking at Ford. And we're on our five-minute chart. And the way to zoom in on the platform. Well, there's two ways, which I'll show you. But the most precise is going to be if you left click and you hold down and you drag, you're going to see it's a different color there, which is going to be the space that you're going to zoom in on.
So, you're going to go as far as you want. And then when you let go, that's what you're going to be zoomed in on. So that's one way to do it. Another way is going to be on the bottom of the screen if you prefer using the magnifying glasses, that's another but less precise way. So let me show you this Keep Time zoom feature.
So right now, we're zoomed in on this Ford five-minute chart. And we have our keep time zoom selected now. And if we switch over to Disney we're going to see it keeps it in that zoom. Let me show you, for example, if we uncheck that, and then we switch back to Ford. It takes away our time zoom and brings us back to the standard zoom. Also, one cool trick if you are zoomed in on the platform, an easy way to get back to the normal view is just by double clicking anywhere on the chart and that brings you back to your normal view.
So now we're going to look at adding studies to your platform.
You can see here there's a studies beaker, which if you click on and you go to Add study or Quick Studies, there's going to be a lot of options with different categories where if you're not sure which study you're looking for, it might be good to browse those categories.
But if you want to be a little bit more specific, you can click on this beaker here, which is going to bring you to our Edit Studies window. And same thing. You can browse through all these different studies. There is a lot on here. But if there's one that you know what you're looking for. So, for example let's type in simple and we can add a couple simple moving averages.
And just to get a few more on here for example, let's put in the Bollinger Bands and let's get something in our lower section so we can put in RSI as well. And what I'm doing to add these you can either double click on the study that you'd like to add, or you can click it once to highlight it.
Click on Add selected and it will bring it over to the right side. This is where you can go in with these gears and you can be more specific. So, let's say instead of a nine period, which is the default for our simple moving average, we want to change it to a 50. That's where we can just click on the settings gear, go into our length and change that.
But there's a cool feature here that's been added to thinkorswim recently. First let's Apply these studies so we can see we got all those on the chart now. But let's say we didn't want to have to delete studies when we were done with them. Add them back. This new feature which was added. There's a little eyeball here.
If you click on the eyeball, you see there's going to be a line through it, which means that it's going to temporarily hide those studies. So, if we do that, click Apply. Now we can see we're back to our normal chart without those studies on it.
One last thing I want to leave you with is going to be the color link. So, we can see here we have a watchlist set up with a yellow two. These are our different options because this is very useful and a different a lot of different parts of the platform.
So right now, we have our yellow 2. This is currently a red 1. So, if we go up here and we also change this to a yellow 2, rather than having to go in and type in every symbol that we're looking at, we can just go here, left click on the symbol that we would like to see on our watchlist. And because these two are linked, it's very quickly switching our symbol on our chart.
Today we took a look at a few ways to customize our thinkorswim charts to learn more about thinkorswim.
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