Hello everyone, and welcome to Schwab Coaching. My name is Cameron May. I'm a senior manager here at Schwab, and this is getting started with Thinkorswim. I've been thinking about this webcast specifically for a long time. I'm really looking forward to it. I'm calling this webcast 'My Master Guide to Using Thinkorswim Powerful Charts.' We're going to be talking all about charts today. So, if you even have a little bit of curiosity about how traders might look at charts and how they might use the tools that are available on the Thinkorswim desktop platform, you're in exactly the right place. We're literally going to start up at the upper left and work our way across and down the right side and down at the bottom, acquainting with ourselves with as many tools as we can in a 45-minute segment.
So it should be a great discussion. It's intended to be a companion piece for last week's webcast where I provided what I called the first timer's guide to setting up charts on Thinkorswim desktop. So I think it should be a very nice dovetail. I'll show you where to find that guide as well. After we're done with this one. But we'll get to all to all of that in just a moment. I first of all want to say hello to everybody who's joining us out there in YouTube. Lots of familiar names, lots of new people. Welcome to all you first-timers chatting. Let me know if you're here for the first time. But hello there, Renee and Regina, TMTM, John, Sharon, Ted, Bruce, Eva, Jim, Olga, Bob, Will, Myron, on and on the list goes.
Thanks for joining us week after week. Your attendance here and your contributions to these discussions are always appreciated. As I already mentioned, welcome to our first-timers. Timers, it's great to have you on board. And if you're if you are watching the YouTube archive after the fact of just watching the recording of this discussion, enjoy the show. But be aware that you're invited to join us in the live discussion. This is a Wednesday webcast series. It kicks off promptly to Eastern time. We'd love to have you in the live stream. And I'm also joined here in the live stream by my very good friend, Kevin Horner. He's already helping out those that are already chatting in questions. Kevin's another of our faculty members. He's going to be joining us in the live stream.
So if you'd like to join us in the live stream, feel free to do so. And if you'd like to join us in the live stream, feel free to do so. And if you'd like to join us in the live stream, feel free to do so. And if you'd like to join us in the live stream, feel free to do so. And if you'd like to join us in the live stream, feel free to do so. And if you'd like to join us in the live stream, feel free to do so. And if you'd like to join us in the live stream, feel free to do so. And if you'd like to join us in the live stream, feel free to do so.
And if you'd like to join us in the live stream, feel free to do so. And if you'd like to join us in the live stream, feel free to join us in the live stream, feel free to join us in the live stream, feel free to join us in the live stream, feel free to join us in the live stream, feel free to join us in the live stream, feel free to join us in the live stream, feel free to join us in the live stream, feel free to join us in the live stream, feel free to join us in the live stream, feel free to join us in the live stream, feel free to join us in the live stream, feel free to join us in the a lot of tools.
Keep an eye out for the ones that seem, if they're interesting to you. Don't try to learn them all, remember them all. I wouldn't expect that of anyone. But yeah, watch for the ones that seem to be intriguing to you and maybe come back and revisit the archive for this webcast later to catch up on the ones that you didn't quite process the first time through. But first thing that we need to do is to consider the risks associated with investing. Of course, risks are real. That applies to what we're discussing as well. So these disclosures are important. The information here is for general informational purposes only. It should not be considered an individualized recommendation or endorsement of any particular security, chart pattern, or investment strategy.
Schwab does not recommend the use of technical analysis as a sole means of investment research. And investing involves risks, including the loss of principle. So, with that said, yeah, today's my master guide to using Thinkorswim's powerful charts. So where it's all about charting, the agenda is just let's get onto Thinkorswim desktop and let's start moving left to right and learning these tools. So as I do that, first thing, I want to make sure that everybody's on board with Abigail, is saying you're a first-timer. Tatiana, Tatanya, welcome. Joan, welcome too as well. But I want to make sure that I don't leave anybody in the dust. This is probably a platform that's going to be new to some people. It is available to download; it's software that can be downloaded to your personal device.
It's available within your Schwab online account. And you find it by, by logging in, you go to the trade tab and just go to Thinkorswim desktop here under the trading platforms. And then there'll be a big button. You can't miss it. It's right down here. It says, learn how to enable Thinkorswim. That'll download the software to your desktop. You can just click on the Thinkorswim icon and log in with your Schwab login credentials. And you're right where I am. Okay. So let's take us now to the Thinkorswim desktop. And we find ourselves on what's called the Thinkorswim desktop. And we're going to start with a blank chart and just work our way left to right. So first thing, obviously let's put a symbol in here.
I'm going to type in Apple, just as our example symbol today. If you don't know the symbol, you can actually just type in the name of the company and the software will propose, well, Cameron, is this the stock you're looking for? You can just choose it from the menu there. Okay. Now, I'm just going to move across this row of icons to acquaint us with the chart functionalities. Then we're going to move down this right side, covering as much as we can. And then we're going to come across the bottom and maybe even circle back in here, do some things on the chart itself. Okay. Renee says, 'Is there a fee for Thinkorswim? Nope. It is free to download, free to use. It's not always free to trade, of course, right?
There can be commissions associated with trading and there are risks associated with trading as well. So one thing I want to point out here in the symbol box itself is this little drop down arrow. If we click on that, you'll notice that we get this pop up of sub menus that give us other things that can be charted very quickly. For example, maybe we want to look at what's going on with the major indices. We want to see what's happening with the Dow Jones Industrial Average.' Well, we could click on the little arrow, choose the Dow Jones Industrial Average from the menu. And there we go. If you're wondering, hey, Cameron, where did all this fancy stuff come from on your chart? Those are just drawings I made in a previous discussion.
Okay. We'll learn about drawings today. Or maybe we want to look at our current positions. Well, in this example portfolio, we have a position on Cisco Systems. So I could select Cisco and that brings up a chart of those positions. All right. So already we're getting some familiarity with these functions. Just to the right of the symbol box, let's flash ourselves back here to Apple. There we go. So just a nice clean chart. That's why I'm using it. Some of these other charts have drawings that can just be charted. Just complicate the visual look of the discussion. But right next to the symbol box is a little link. And you will see this link elsewhere on the platform. And what that does is anything that is linked using the same number, as we click on that, we're given a menu of numbers.
If we choose a number and then we see the link somewhere else on the platform and choose a number there, what that does is it just moves the symbol around on the platform. So whatever we're viewing here, we would be viewing somewhere else on the trade tab, on the left column. As a matter of fact, let me demonstrate that. So here in our left column, you'll notice I have a watch list. And it is linked at one. You see the one here and the one there. That means that these two gizmos, I'm just going to call them that just because I want to, are now linked. So if I were to click on Microsoft in the left column, my chart just went to Microsoft. If I click on Meta, my chart just went to Meta.
So let's go back to Apple. I'm going to close the little arrow in the middle. And it shrinks that up. Hey, Nicole, welcome. Moving further to the right, we're going to see some information about our company. And that extends down below as well. So we can see the name of the company. We can see what it's currently trading for, the most recent price, 241. 52. We can see whether that price is up or down in numerical terms and in percentage terms. So down 66 cents on Apple today or 0. 26. We can see the bid price and the ask price of the current trades. And down below, we're seeing this row of information. Again, Apple, it's telling me the time frame of the chart, one year, one day chart.
It's telling me the exchange that's providing the quote. But below that are a series of letters, D-O-H-L-C-R-Y. D, all of these, by the way, just relate to wherever I have my arrow or my cursor positioned on the chart. So I'm going to just put it there on the chart. I'm going to take my hands off my mouse so things aren't moving around. Now look back up to that D-O-H-L-C-R-Y that I was talking about. D is the date that I'm pointing at. So I happen to have settled on August 22nd. O is the opening price, $227 . 79. I is $228 . 34. Low for that day, $223 . 90. The close of that day, $224 .
53. Range in price from high to low, $4 . 44. In other words, that was the height of that day's candle. And then finally, we have this thing called the Y. Well, what is the Y figure? Well, if you follow the horizontal line that's intersecting with my cursor all the way over to the far right margin, you'll see that that Y value is also shown in gray all the way over here to the right. Let me kind of point over there. Do you see that? Let's put that right there. Just let my cursor sit for a moment. And then I'm going to take my cursor and I'm going to put it over here for a moment. So it says $236. 76.
That's just my cursor on the price chart, its position relative to what we call the Y axis, this price axis over here to the right. So as I go up, that number goes up. And as I go down, that number goes down. So it makes it very handy that I can intersect wherever I point. I see all the details of that day's price activity, but I can also see I can intercept price with time. Lots of different potential applications. For a technical trader. So look at that. We've already covered all of this stuff here. So let's get over here. Dig into this stuff. First icon here is a share icon. Now, Andrea asked a great question: Will this presentation be available for viewing afterwards so we can review the information? Yes.
Now, unless I screw something up terribly or there's some technical glitch that prevents it from happening every once in a great while where we aren't able to upload a video. But yeah, this one's planned to be added to our YouTube archives. Okay. Matter of fact, let me hit the pause button on our demonstration here because I want to encourage everybody that's watching to do something for themselves. And that is make sure that you're subscribed to our YouTube channel where we post all this stuff. So you can find that on our Trader Talks. Well, it's called Trader Talks Schwab Coaching Webcast. That's our YouTube channel name. It doesn't cost anything to subscribe, but this is where we post our playlists of previous webcasts. You can join the live streams right here.
You can even do searches. You can even do a live stream. You can even do a live chat. You can even do a live chat. You can even do a live chat. You can even do a live chat. So for example, maybe I want to see that setting up charts discussion. Let me see if this works. I didn't even try this first. You should never demonstrate something as the presenter without trying it first. But I'm going to see if this has been added to the, yeah, this will work. Yep. Think of desktop chart setup, easy steps, first-time users. That's not last week's presentation. That's one that I did sometime ago. But another place that we can find last week's presentation, I could scroll down and find it in this list, but we can go to the playlists.
And you know what? Somebody's series has to be at the bottom. Here's our playlist of all of our YouTube series. Mine happens to be the one at the very bottom. So just keep scrolling, keep scrolling. It's down there at the bottom. And you can view the playlist of this entire series, including the first-timers guide to setting up charts on Thinkorswim desktop. All right. So enough of that. Let's go back to our platform. But right here is a function that allows, if we have, let's say, two Thinkorswim users and they like to say, hey, look at this cool chart I just set up. I'm going to send it to you. We can share chart setups between one another. So all we do is click on share.
I'm going to open up my left column here just so I can illustrate something else here. This is going to create a link. But the link only works on the Thinkorswim platform. People commonly think, oh, I take this and I go put it in the chat. I'm going to put it in the chat. I'm going to put it in the internet and find it there. Nope. So I'm going to click on share and then just click share again. And that just created this link, HTTP. There's your link. I don't even have to do anything beyond that. That is now copied. As a matter of fact, I can come over here and paste it right there. So that's just to show you that link.
But we could send that to a friend and they could go to their own Thinkorswim account, their setup, and open that shared item. They just post the link, paste the link in here, click preview and import it. So that's what that function is. Notice some of these things maybe you're going to use, maybe not. I'm going to show as many of them to you as I can, make this as complete a guide as possible. Now, lots of chart users like to use their favorite technical indicators, moving averages, MACD studies, RSI, CCI. There's many that I could list off. Thinkorswim has an extensive archive, an extensive library of available technical studies or technical tools. Those can be found right here. They can alternately be found right over here.
So I'm going to click on this one, the edit studies icon. And right here in alphabetical order are all of these technical tools that can be chosen from in alphabetical order. Now, another thing that we could do is if we already know the name of our indicator, just type it in as a keyword search and that'll help us find it. But once we've found it, the way to add it to our chart, highlight that, just click on it, add that to the chart, click apply and click okay. So I just added what's known as a MACD histogram. Half of you aren't going to know what the heck that thing is. That's okay. I just wanted to show how technical tools can be added to charts.
And by the way, if you find an indicator that we don't know anything about, well, just click on the little question mark right next to the name in the menu, and this will give us a pop-up. It'll teach us some basics about the indicator. Is it going to make us a pro at trading that indicator? Of course it's not. Nope. But here's like a summary of the MACD, moving average convergent divergent indicator. We can scroll down and read some more about it. Click on that again, and I'm just going to close it out. There we go. All right. So there's our indicator. It doesn't matter. In fact, if I want to edit, get rid of that indicator, which I kind of do right now, I'll just go back, click up on edit studies again.
And over here is our indicator. It's been added as a lower study below our price. And if I wanted to customize it, I could click on this little gear. I'm not going to get that fancy today in this presentation, but to clear it out, I'll just click the X, click apply, click okay. And that indicator is gone. All right. So let's move on. This gear icon to the right of our studies icon is our chart settings icon. This is where we set up the chart. Some traders just have a preference for what gets automatically displayed on every chart moving forward. Maybe they want to see earnings announcements. Maybe they want to make sure that volume is displayed. Those sorts of settings are made right here. So I'm going to click on chart settings.
And by the way, as I make each of these changes, if I add a study, if I change the setting, and then I close down thinkorswim, you're probably thinking, so Cameron, wait a second, how do I save all that stuff that I just went to the trouble of set up? There's, for most things on thinkorswim, not a need to click on save. It's just automatically saved that way. Thinkorswim just comes back the way you left it, even as you close it out and you log out, when you log in the next time, pops back up, it's on the same chart. It has the same chart settings, even has the same studies applied. All right. But here, there are all kinds of changes we might make to our chart settings.
They might be general changes, like some people like to see their orders are displayed on the charts, for example. They might have something displayed on what's called the price axis, which is just the dates. This is something commonly used by, oh, sorry, I got a little bit ahead of myself. That'd be the time axis. In any case, if we're looking at the time axis, for example, some of our options traders might use a function called show expiration Friday, which draws a line to show on the chart when contracts are expiring. I'm not going to do that today. But some common tools that are employed here are under the equities tab. Here is where we would find, well, equities, stocks, basically, is where we would show volume on a chart.
Another function here is show corporate actions. A corporate action is any action that a corporation might take that might affect its share value, like a dividend or earnings announcement, a split. If I want to see icons that indicate those sorts of actions have been or will shortly be taken, I can just click on this box. Eva, it's a good question. I don't want to get off into options clarifications, if you'll forgive me. Ben actually just did a great discussion a little bit earlier today. We searched several different options out here, we felt free to look across every website, making our own freedom from all the clients. But let me definitely guarantee you that there may not be any really section that might affect that because we're always looking for things that add value here and there.
I want to say something to that. If I wanted, I would look at it from an area that wasn't really USB, let's just say Ita, snortle mark, and it says button spot. I would like that as well. Well, you'll notice just here we also say Don't change this one, and I'll say then will likely be it's changed. Was actually delivered by the company. It links to a conference call here. Just to the right of that are the dividend icons, these dollar signs, 25 cent dividend paid here, 25 cent dividend paid here and here. So what I would invite you to do, I think what you're already getting, even in what I'm referring to as my master guide to using Thinkorswim powerful chart tools is you're noticing, well, there's, I know Cameron tries to do his best, but he isn't that good.
He can't cover everything that's on Thinkorswim. No, I wanted to provide a general guide to where to find things and generally what they do. And then the trader can get in here and explore, especially in their paper money portfolio, in their paper money account. When you log into thinkorswim, you're asked whether you wanna log into paper money or into your live accounts. Paper money is a simulated trading environment that has the vast majority of exactly the same tools as the live platform. So you can get in here and just start poking around, learn these tools on your own, give priority where it's important to you, spend less time where it's not important, but I wanna give you at least exposure to what these things generally do.
So that's our, we've already acquainted ourselves with these functions, with a share function, got an introduction to the edit studies tool and the chart settings. How about timeframe? Right now, I'm on a one-year daily chart. And this tab up here is indicating a D, which tells us we're looking at a daily chart. That means that each individual candle here represents one day of trading activity. Well, I can choose other timeframes. I can choose from a default menu of favorites, or I can make a custom timeframe. So I'm on a one-year daily chart. I could switch this to a three-year weekly chart with a click. Now we're looking at the last three years on our chart. I could pop back up here and go to 10 years, or I can go to an hourly chart and so on.
Or if I wanted to customize it, I had a request earlier that just wanted a different set of timeframes than is in that favorites list. Well, we can get that different set of timeframes right here. These are kind of longer term, one month, three months, six months, nine months. We can go shorter term, intraday, one day, two days, three days, four days. We can set up a custom timeframe right here, or, and I just want to point out we can choose the timeframe and we can also choose something called the aggregation period. Woof, that's a mouthful. What is an aggregation period? That just means the candle. What's the length of the candle? So a one-day, one-minute chart would be a one-day chart with one-minute candles. A one-day, five-minute chart, the aggregation period is a five-minute candle.
Hope that makes sense. So that's where we change our timeframe. Let's switch this back using our favorites to our one-year daily chart. Here's what keeps ourselves grounded again. Next up is our chart style. Now, right now we have what's called a candle chart. Gives us four bits of data about each trading session or each aggregation period. Each day, it tells us the high, the low, the open and the close. That's what a candle does for a trader. Some traders don't prefer that. They might prefer a style of chart, like a candle chart. So I might click on style, like a candle chart. So what I was already said, like a line chart. Let's switch this to a line chart. So we clicked on chart type candle and change that to line.
And that just gives us instead of open high low low close it's just connecting each day's close with the next and drawing a line that way. So for some traders they prefer this. They might see it as a cleaner view of the chart. So there are lots of other styles of charts that might be selected. And if we have a preference for multiple styles and actually other customizations that are made, for example, the fact that I've added volume and the fact that I've added our corporate, corporate actions here could generally be included in that concept of a style. These are customizations that a trader's made to a chart. And so for some, they actually prefer to save that style. How about I come to this same menu?
I'm gonna click on this style of chart, and I'm gonna say, you know what? This is a line chart with a wall and a curve. Corporate actions. I don't know what we might want to call this. Anyway, save that style of chart. So then if I have later switched this back to a candle and maybe I've gotten rid of those other chart settings, let's take the volume off. Let's take the corporate actions off. And then I'm looking at a new stock and I think, you know what, I wonder, I'd like to see GE with my line chart. And I like to see the volume. I'd like to see all that other stuff. I don't wanna have to go load it all back up again.
We go up to style and just load that style that I previously saved. There's my line chart with corporate actions. Bang, loads them right back up again. So nifty feature right there under that style menu. Lots of other features. Gives us direct access to our settings. Lots of other things that I'm not gonna get into today, but just don't worry about it. Don't be afraid. Click on the menu. We'll read through, see if something's intriguing, click on that and investigate it. When we're in a simulated trading environment, there's no real skin in the game. There's no real damage that can be done to one's portfolio. It's a great place to learn the tools and strategies and techniques and new approaches to the market with no risk, okay? All right, next up are drawing tools.
All right, you know what? I'm gonna switch this back. Let's switch our style back to our candle style. There we go. Drawing tools are technical traders. Very commonly like to look for things like price floors and price ceilings. They like to make notes on charts, all kinds of things. Using more advanced tools like Fibonacci retracements and extensions and fans and arcs and lines. Josh, are you saying I like you like you? Well, I hope you're referring to this, this demonstration. Maybe it's something that Kevin said in either case. Good, but I'm gonna go to the drawings. And there are a couple of ways actually to access our drawing tools. So we can access the drawing tools right here. So if I click on drawings, I go down to the drawing tools.
I get this menu of potential tools. What you'll notice is down at the bottom, there's also the possibility to choose these drawings. Now, one is just a pointer. We have the ability to draw, draw, draw, draw trend lines and horizontal price lines, time levels, which is another line, tech notes, arrows, ovals, rectangles, channels, or two parallel lines, all kinds of things. And down here are our tools for our Fibonacci traders. Let me just do a simple one. I'm going to switch this just a, I don't know if simple is not always the right word. To me, this is kind of easy to use, but really with all of our drawing tools, the way to draw something on Thinkorswim is to select your drawing tool that you like, go to where you want to start your drawing.
So let's say our trader has noticed, boy, it seems like GE has really been holding up pretty well above about 155 bucks, right about this level. And they want to draw a line on there to represent that. Well, you just go to where we want to start the line. We click once, that sort of starts our line. And then we go over to the right and we click again, or we go over to wherever we want to end the line. Click again, and that sets the line. Now, I kind of cheated because my line is already this nice, nifty kind of blue dashed line, whereas the default is going to be a thin, solid black line. That's because I edited the properties of this line and saved it as a default.
So anytime we want to customize one of our drawings, we just make a drawing and then right click on it and we can edit its properties. So for example, maybe I want to change this from blue to black. How about I just go in reverse? I'm going to set this back to what it would look like the first time you draw something. Change our color to black, our style to a solid line with a one out of five. Save that as a default and then click OK. And what that just did is now that line is a thin black line. And any subsequent line that I draw is going to be a thin black line. Just draw lines all over the place.
And if I want to get rid of those drawings, I can right-click and remove one or clear up the whole drawing set. Let's clear that whole drawing set. Someone else says, can we demonstrate the oval tool? Yeah, let me select the oval. Let me just draw an oval. I click once where I want to start my oval. I click again where I want to end my oval. And there it is. This one I've customized because I right-clicked, edited the properties. I gave it a blue color and I saved it as a default. So again, experiment with the tools that are of interest to you, clutter up a chart and then right-click and just clear the whole drawing set, clean it all off. Next up, we have these studies. Well, this sounds familiar.
We already had studies over here. It's true. Yeah, there's definitely some overlap between these two functions. Our edit studies gives us access to all of our technical tools. Our studies tab also gives us access to all those tools, but they're arranged in a couple of different ways. The first is what we call a quick study, which is I just want to look at one study on my chart, and then maybe I want to look at another separate study, get rid of the first one, put another one on the chart. So if we just want a quick study, we can pop up, let's maybe go for our momentum studies. There's our momentum studies. There's our MACD histogram. And that just added the MACD histogram below.
If I go back up to studies and I go to quick study again, and let's say we put a moving average on there, like a, let me, let me, I just got a little bit off. Anyway, let's go to a simple moving average. Notice that applied a simple moving average, but our MACD is gone. Yeah. Quick study just means one study. Add study says, let's put another study on. That's what that is. So if you were to go back to your momentum studies, add that MACD histogram, now we have the line, we have our simple moving average line, and we also have our MACD histogram. Now, if we've created a group of studies known as a study set, we can actually save those for future retrieval if we want to delete them, but we want to be able to quickly load them again.
So for example, let me save this study set that I have right here. And how about this? How about we just call it a moving average and MACD, you know, you can give it whatever name you want, but if I click save, now I can pop up to studies. Now let's, let's clean it up first. Let's remove these studies. I'm going to go to edit studies, remove this moving average, remove the MACD histogram, click apply, click. Okay. They're gone. How do I get them back? Studies. Load study set. There it is. It's actually a different one that I created. Did my names were the fake name that I just made up was too similar to another one. I got momentarily confused. Don't do that. Anyway, there we go.
At least you get the concept. So we're really getting acquainted with these tools, at least at a higher level. This is an introduction in 45 minutes. I said we'd be covering a lot. Now, next up is a patterns tool. Which might. I'm not sure. I'm not going to get, I don't, I don't think I'm gonna explore this one today. It would just take me a little bit too much time to really introduce. This is where traders who use, let's say candlesticks or chart patterns like flags and, and triangles and rectangles and those sorts of things. They can go look for patterns, but I'll tell you a search engine that's looking for patterns is sometimes not perfectly in sync with what's going on in the head of the trader for what they would consider to be a pattern.
So one thing I might say here is explore it. See if the results actually align with the way you typically see a pattern and maybe it's useful then. But I don't want, didn't want to get too far into that one. I think it would just take a little bit too much. All right, so let's get over here to this right column. We have these, these, these row of this row of tabs. And I'll just say quick navigation here is, is as you click on anything in this right row, it adds that to your chart. So you click on it to add it. You click on it to delete it and you can stack them up, just start clicking on things and it really starts like here's our chart I've now added this little gadget up here, I've added this one here, and I've added this one there.
Just by clicking on things if I want to clean them up and start to get rid of them I click on them again. All right before I even show how what these individual ones are I want to point out the current one that's highlighted is a C4 chart. If we ever accidentally click on that, the chart disappears; there's nothing here even though we have this symbol up here. So if you're ever wondering what in the world happened why do I have a blank screen, click on the C and by the way, is there a survey? I think you guys have been super active yeah let me let me do this I don't know that there is a survey I don't think so.
Okay I just scrolled up and through I didn't see a survey I just saw somebody mentioned one so I wanted to make sure I didn't miss it anyway, um Clark yes this will be posted later. To our archive, so you can go back and re-watch this if you like. But let's start with these buttons up here. First one, if we want to see what the the name of the button is, you can just hover over it-this is the trade button, I think. Let's let's clean this up a little bit. Let's get rid of these 'studies' and this volume so we can get rid of the studies by editing studies x and x, click apply, click ok. That's much cleaner. Volume where did we find that?
That was a chart setting under equities, volume let's apply that and okay, that's just going to look a little less cluttered. We add other features here so first is going to be our trade tab now. This is for speed of of entry for trades if we click on this trade button it puts a box on the chart setting a chart that says volume and then we're going to add some, and a sell button up here by default for a hundred shares. These are customizable if we want to. And by default, limit orders, good for the day, for you traders who want to be able looking at your chart and then quickly buy or sell, right? There are similar functions right over here. It just depends on a trader's preference for where they want those buttons to be.
You can either have them up at the top using the trade button. You can have them off to the right using the buttons button. See that right there? Or we can have them down below using the dashboard button. Okay, there are some minor differences among those three features. But to me, the biggest deal is just the position relative to the chart. So that's what those three things do. So we've already learned most, not most of them, but half of these. Next up, we have something called the time and sales. This is sort of a tick-by-tick report of the trade activity for your stock that you're charting. So we can click on that and we can see, literally tick by tick, minute by minute, you can see this is down to the second.
This is giving us the price and the size of each trade. So for those of you who like to track that, that's how that's accessed. Our active trader is a tool that very much is designed what it's for, what its title suggests. It's for those that are a little bit more active. It's for those that are a little bit more active. It gives us a tick by tick breakdown of the price of the stock. And it shows us any open orders at those different prices. It shows us the trading volume off to the left, and it allows us to enter trades right up here at the top with some default quantities, a default time and force. Obviously these are also customizable. So again, with each of these, get into the simulated trading environment, just experiment, see what happens.
Click on things. Ooh, didn't expect that. But that's our active trader tool. We already learned about the buttons tool. That was this one off to the left, off to the right. Then we have our option chain tool for our options traders, abbreviated to OC. It just brings up the option chain. For those of you who use the option chain, it functions just like the other one. And yes, we can place trades from that options chain. You can click on that, on any strike, on any strike price and load up an options trade. I'm just gonna close that out. Finally, we have our level two. Let me get out of the way there. Our level two and our live news functions.
And as I mentioned, we can load these up either one at a time with our charts, or we can stack them up in multiples. Let's put our level two trading up here, which gives us the exchanges from which the quotes are being derived, the bid price, the bid size, the ask price, the ask size, and so on. And let's add our live news. So there we can have the chart. We could have our level two information, and we have our live news for the charted stock. This live news, if you haven't seen that before, you can actually even just click on a headline and it brings up the, if there's an associated article with that headline, it'll bring that up for us. So pretty nifty functionalities there.
Now, I was about to say finally, there's always something more I could show you, but I also want to point out down here at the bottom, some of these functions. We've already discussed the drawing tools that are available down here. There is a zoom feature right here, these magnifying glasses. We can zoom in on the chart, click on the plus, zoom out on the chart, click on the minus, but we can also click and drag anywhere on the chart, and that will zoom in on that timeframe. And then to zoom back out, we can double click on the chart, or we can use that minus sign again. Now, while we're zoomed, we can go down to the very bottom and there's a scroll bar, scroll right, scroll left.
It just remains that same width of the zoom timeframe that we selected. All right, let's zoom back out. I'm going to double click on the chart this time, just to zoom back out. Now, these two icons just to the left of the zoom features, we have our cursor type. Now, my preference when I'm demonstrating things is I use the cross hairs. So you'll see that's checked. If others have another preference, maybe they don't need the horizontal line. They don't need the vertical line. Maybe they don't need lines at all. You can just choose none. And then your cursor isn't being followed, pestered by these lines, or we could choose one or the other. There's our horizontal line. That's our price line. Here's our vertical line, which would just help us know which date is being displayed.
But I like to see the intersection of price and time. And then this final icon down at the bottom is our right expansion settings icon. That's kind of a mouthful as well. Well, for some traders, they don't like to have their candles bumping right up against this right margin. They like to have some extra space out here. So that when they make drawings, they're sort of going out into the future. It helps them visualize things as they may develop in the future. So if I click on that right expansion settings, let me change the current right expansion settings. Right now we're seeing zero extra space. Let's change that to maybe 10 bars on a day chart. That means 10 days of extra space off here to the right.
So I'm gonna click apply and click okay. And we get that extra space there. So that's that. That function. Now, I am going to say the final thing that I wanted to demonstrate is that even embedded within the chart itself or other capabilities, if we right-click on the chart, we get a new menu. Now this is to change the chart scale. We can add a drawing. This gives us access to those same drawing tools. We can even place orders right from the chart. We can throw this into what we call our analyze tool. We can access studies. We can access our styles. All of that's available just with a right-click. I don't need to go through all of that stuff again because I gave you the introduction through the other navigational portals.
Guys, that how's that for accomplishing a master guide to using Thinkorswim's powerful charts? That's a lot. I hope that nobody feels overwhelmed. It's never in my intent. My intent is to provide an introduction, help us gain our bearings, and then you can get in, learn and explore this just on your own. See what's important. I hope, hopefully at least that's gotten you started on what seems to be important to you as you're learning these charting tools. But it's time for me to wrap it up and let you go. But before I do that, I do want to make you aware of some other resources. One thing that we talked about is subscribing to our channel. Yeah, I think that's a good idea for anyone.
If you haven't subscribed to the channel yet, you can go right down below the display window right now, right at the bottom of my screen. It'll say, subscribe, click on that. That's all it takes. Doesn't cost anything, but it subscribes you to our Trader Talks Schwab Coaching webcast channel, which is where we post these playlists for these archives. I get lots of questions all through the webcast. Cameron, is this going to be available later? Cameron, is this going to be available later? Yes, this one will. The vast majority of our webcasts are available after the live stream. And they're found here under playlists. But you can also just join the live streams directly right there on Live. Or as we demonstrated earlier in this webcast, you can do a keyword search to learn something new.
Another thing that I'm going to strongly recommend is that if you are not following Kevin, Kevin's done a fabulous job there in chats. I know he has. And by the way, Peter, welcome. Great to have you here as a first timer. I see still some people chiming in as first timers. If you're not following Kevin Horner on X, then you're also missing out on some other educational resources. We post stuff on X. And when you reply to me, I try to reply back to you. So it allows for some personal interaction, not otherwise available with the cameras not on. So you can follow Kevin at Kevin Horner CS. You can follow me at Cameron May CS. So if you want to see, you can follow me at Cameron May CS.
Right here on my screen. Let's see if we, yeah. You can just look right down at the bottom of your screens right now and you can see that X handle at Cameron May CS. All right. But everybody thanks for giving me your time today. We had a really good attendance here. That was fabulous to see. We have over 500 people watching the live stream. 84 of you have already clicked the thumbs up or the like button on YouTube. Do me a favor. If you watched one of our webcasts and you enjoyed it, click that 'like' button every time because here's the two things that does for your presenter. Number one, it's a pat on their back. Sounds like applause to us. That's the way that we see it.
But it also gives our webcast a boost in the YouTube algorithm when we archive it so that more people get to see it. It doesn't cost them to see it as well, anything as well. So yeah, just click on that 'like' button if you do that for your presenter. If you enjoyed the presentation, don't always have to do it. But if you didn't like it, don't like it. But thanks, Kevin. Thanks for helping out. Everybody go enjoy the rest of our webcast. I'm going to go get this one titled and let's get it processed and get it on the archive so you can check it out again if you want to go back and revisit this stuff. I will see you in a future webcast. I have something new each day of the week on a range of topics. So make sure that you're coming here. You're going to our live streams. I'd love to see you in a future live stream. Just watch the archives. That's cool, too. But I'll also look for you on next. But whenever I see you again, until that moment arrives, I want to wish you the very best of luck. Happy trading. Bye-bye.
