Customizing Gadgets and Sidebar on thinkorswim®

Upbeat music plays throughout.

Narrator: Hi, traders. I'm Anthony Panzeca. The left sidebar is an area in the thinkorswim^® platform where you can keep track of all of your account balances, view market information, and watch live news without ever having to leave the main window of the platform. Let's jump right in and take a look.

Animation: thinkorswim platform appears with left-hand sidebar open.

Narrator: The left-hand side bar is located on the left-hand side of your screen. You can think of it like a dashboard that no matter where you are on the platform. It will always be visible for you off to the left. It is completely customizable. You decide what goes where and how it's laid out. It allows you to add and remove a number of different gadgets on the platform, including utilities and other features. Let's show you how.

When you first log into the thinkorswim platform, you'll see a few different preloaded gadgets off to the left. These include account information, live news, Trader TV, watchlist. And down below, if you click this little arrow down here, you'll see that there's another quick chart.

Animation: Arrow clicks on arrow at the bottom of the left-hand sidebar to open and close a stock chart.

Narrator: And you can use these arrows to scroll up and down.

To remove a gadget, all you have to do is come up to the little menu, click on that, and then you can delete the gadget from here. Or you can come down here, click on the little gear wheel, and then click on the X, and it'll remove the gadget for you.

The only gadget you can't delete is the Account Information section. If you're in a public place and you don't want people to see your account information, you can either click on Option Buying Power or Net Liq & Day Trades, and you can put it into Privacy mode, and it'll hide all of that information for you.

And now we can drop down to the watchlist. Watchlist is an interesting feature. There's a lot you can do with this little tab here. So I'm just going to go ahead and expand that, just like that. You can add or remove symbols from the watchlist just by doing this. You can click on Facebook if you want. Backspace and enter will delete it. If I want to add it back on, just click into an empty field below. We're going to put FB right back in there. OK? You can actually move symbols around on the watchlist as well. So if I wanted to move Microsoft up or down the watchlist, I could simply click on it and drag it to where I want it to go, and bam. It lands right where you want it to go.

A couple different things up here. If you click on here, this is the default watchlist. If you click on it, you have a number of different areas that show up here. All of your personal watchlists will be at the top, and then you have another watchlist. You have the Dow Jones Industrial Average^®, all the different ETFs, percentage gainers and losers. For right now, we'll just click on the Dow Jones Industrial Average, and it shows all the stocks that are in the Dow Jones Industrial Average. You can see them all right there.

Another cool thing that you can do is you could actually link your watchlist to the rest of the platform. So we're going to take this little number two here. We can change that to any color we want. We'll change it to red. And then we're going to change the Trade tab paperclip to red as well. And now you're going to see when you click on something in the watchlist, it also populates off to the right in the Trade tab. You could also do this with the charts as well. If I click on CAT, that will also change in the chart. Very cool feature.

So this part of the platform here, you're going to have a limited amount of real estate, so just be careful how much you have in there and how much you take out. You can also adjust the sidebar right here by moving it left or right to give yourself a little more room. OK?

Now on to the next. We have a quick chart right here. This is defaulted on the platform as well, and this will always be available for you. So if you just want to see a quick chart on, let's say, Apple, you can type in Apple into there, and that will populate for you.

OK. So let's go through the customization process. You can come down to this little gear wheel right here.

Animation: Arrow clicks on gear wheel and the plus sign at the bottom of the left-hand sidebar to open list of gadgets.

Narrator: And let's say that you don't like where the quick chart is, and you want it on top. You can simply click on the little gear, get the little hand out, and move this guy up to the top, and he'll move down for you. Let's say you just don't like the quick chart, and you just want to get rid of it and create a little more space. You can click the X, and it'll remove it for you.

This little plus sign here is what you're going to want to come into, and this is the list of all the gadgets that are available on the platform. You can bring up the calculator, Level II quotes. You can actually play games on here. A lot of different things you could do. You can add multiple watchlists, not just one. So let's say you wanted to have the Dow up here to be able to look at that. You can see that up here. And then you have your own personal watchlist that you want to put, say, right below it. You can have your defaulted watchlist there as well.

Another cool feature is Level II quotes. You can have those here as well, and you can link those just by doing that. And every time you change a symbol in your watchlist, your Level II quote will change as well.

And finally, if you want to get rid of the left-hand side bar so you have a little more real estate off to the right, you can simply collapse it by clicking on the arrow. And then if you want it back, click the arrow back, and it'll come back for you.

And that's a quick look at the left-hand side bar on the thinkorswim platform.

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