Hello everyone, and welcome to Schwab Coaching. My name is Cameron May. I' m a Senior Manager and Education Coach here at Schwab, and this is Getting Started with Thinkorswim. Today we' re going to be looking at five little hidden gems that you may not even know right there on Thinkorswim charts. It' s always fun to learn those new nuggets about what may be a very familiar tool, so I think this is going to be a fun one as we go through it. What I' d ask you to do is just keep tabs on the five things that I review here. How many of them were new to you? Maybe I' ll ask at the end how many you already knew but in any case I want to first of all say hello to everybody out there in YouTube.
Hello Alaron, Eva, SpeakTruthSJS, Tony4Checkout2, everybody else. Thanks for joining us week after week. We really do appreciate your attendance and your contributions to these discussions. If this happens to be your first time watching one of my webcasts, well welcome. It' s great to have you here and if you' re watching on the on the YouTube archive after the fact, enjoy the presentation but be aware that you' re invited to join us in a live discussion. This one kicks off promptly three o ' clock eastern time on Mondays. We' d love to have you here and I also want to let you know that my very good friend Kevin Horner is going to be hanging out in the chats with the live audience.
Kevin' s role there is he' s just going to be answering any questions that I can' t get to, that are just as long as they' re on topic. If I can' t address them during the natural flow of the presentation, Kevin' s there to pick up the slack for me, so thanks for being there, Kevin. Kevin and I would like to issue an invitation to you. If you' re not following us on X, please do. It' s a great resource. Best place to connect with your favorite presenters between these live streams. You can find Kevin there at Kevin Horner CS. You can find me on X at Cameron May CS. All right, let' s get into it, as we always do, first thing that we do is pause to consider the risks associated with trading.
Please do bear this in mind. The information here is for general informational purposes only and should not be considered an individualized recommendation or endorsement of any particular security, chart pattern, or investment strategy. Options carry a high level of risk and are not suitable for all investors. 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. Okay, so let' s set an agenda for the day. As I mentioned, we' re talking about five just hidden gems that are found right there on thinkorswim charts. You may or may not know about them but what I' m going to do is introduce what may be familiar tools to you and then just look at things from a little bit different perspective using a different approach on thinkorswim.
Maybe you didn' t know it was there so let' s go right to thinkorswim and I' m going to start with a very basic concept, and that is, just drawing trend lines. So as you all know, drawing trend lines on Thinkorswim. First of all, you will note when I draw a trend line like let' s go here on Amazon. This most recent bounce higher and I' ll say it' s the most recent completed bounce higher. Looks like we' re in the middle of a new one at the moment. We' ll see if that one continues but we started here around August 28th. We' re going to click at the bottom and move up to the top and click again and when I draw a line, yes, you' ll notice mine is sort of a thicker dashed blue line.
That' s because I' ve customized my default here. So if you don' To see it that way, you can right- click on a drawn item on Thinkorswim and this is not the cool new tool that nobody knows about because probably all of you know about this. But yeah, we can change the color here. We can change the style there. We can change the width of the line here and then save our changes as a default. But what you may not have noticed and what' s easy to escape notice because we' re focusing on what we' re doing is as we' re drawing a line, there' s a label, a box that appears as I draw that line. It' s showing me the number of days and the length of the line.
So let me just move to the top of this move here and you' ll see that the length of the line and the length of the line, both the depth and length, all of them contain a number of days. And the length of this move consists of 50 calendar days or 37 trading days. It went up 14. 38% or $23. 76 and at an angle of 38. 51 degrees. I don' t know about the angle thing. I suppose that' s useful to somebody. But as soon as we finish the line with our second click, thereby, you know, we' re concreting the line to the chart. Our little label disappears. Now, as I hover over a drawn line, I can get some of that information back.
I can see where it started and when it started, but I don' t see the number of bars. I don' t see the percentage change or the dollar change. I can calculate some of that, but the label' s missing. And Rob says, are we live? We certainly are, Rob. If anybody needs to, we can chat in, letting Rob know to just refresh the screen. Sometimes if you go away from this, this is a heads up for anybody who' s watching these live streams. If you join and then happen to click on a different tab, different browser window, and then come back, it may sort of stagnate the stream. Anyway, but one other customization that' s easy to escape the attention of the trader here is if I right click on one of these lines, I can edit it, I can further edit its properties.
And I' m gonna show that label, the default is just to never show it once the line is drawn, but we can choose always. So it just sticks in that case, what we' d see is the label just stays on every chart. That can get a little bit cluttery. The one that some traders prefer is on hover. And once I' ve made that change, I can save that as my default. Now, as I click, okay, and I go back and I point at that, you' ll notice, hey, there is my label. I can see that this line was 27 calendar days, 19 trading sessions, up 15. 74%. This one' s not because I drew it before I made that change.
But since I saved this as a default now, every time I draw a line, that' s going to be the new default for my trend line. So I can point at these. And for a trader who uses lines to generate what we call measured moves or estimations of how far the next move might take us, that can be very helpful. If we point at this, I can say, okay, it looks like the last time it took us 19 trading sessions. And here we went up 26 and a half bucks. This one was $31 in 13 trading sessions. This one was $26 in 23 trading sessions. This one was $25 in 12 sessions. So it starts to help the trader gauge, generally, how far they might think the next move is going to take them.
Okay. But that' s a nifty little function. Chat in, yes or no. Do you already know about that one? I suspect there may have been some of you that already knew that one. So let' s right- click here. Let' s just clear off that whole drawing set. But that is hidden gem number one. Let' s look at maybe something that might be slightly more hidden. Another thing that some traders like to do is they like to look at multiple stocks at the same time. You like that one, Villager and Freddie? Okay. Well, one way that a trader might look at multiple stocks is to come up here to the grid and just open up multiple charts. We can do two or three or six or whatever configuration we like here.
Let' s say we do two. So we have Amazon over here. Maybe we' re comparing it to the S&P 500. So we load up the S&P over there. Then we can sort of look back and forth and see how each is doing relative to the other and see if they seem to be moving in generally the same direction at the same time. But other traders actually prefer to have multiple stocks or yes, indices charted on the same chart at the same time. So how' s that done? This is one that I think fewer people know about. It' s been my impression, been my observation as I' ve done this for quite a while now. But that is one of the functions that' s available here under our studies.
I' m gonna go to the studies and add a study. And you ll notice down at the bottom, the very bottom of that study menu is ' Compare with'. Now I can choose an index from the default over here. Or I could enter a custom symbol up here. Or yes, I could actually do both. So I' m gonna choose the S&P 500. And what this now is doing is it' s still charting Amazon as we had before, candle chart. And over here on the Y-axis is Amazon' s price. So the price range here for Amazon. Over here is the price range for the S&P 500. And individually, we can actually move these up and down using that Y-axis, okay? That' s pretty nifty.
And yes, if you wanna change, let' Say we wanna look at Amazon as a line chart, so it looks more like the S&P 500, we could change that chart style and just go from a, let' s say we go from a candle chart to a line chart. There we go. Makes it a little bit easier to see the two on the same chart. But we can also add a third chart. Now, obviously we don' t have two Y-axis to display three stocks. Or three charted symbols. But if I go back up here to studies, and I go to add studies, now I' m not using quick study, I' m using add study. That' s gonna add a third study. If I went to quick study, it would just replace SPX with another symbol.
So I' m gonna go to add study, compare with, how about we look at, what are we looking at, Amazon? Let' So put in a comparison of the S&P, Amazon and Microsoft. So now what you' ll notice is we have, okay, we have, we have our three lines. And these are now displayed all as percentage changes since the start of our chart. So if we' re on a one year daily chart, it' s going back 12 months and showing how those three securities have performed. Or if I wanna change my timeframe here to let' s say, instead of a one year chart, we maybe go to year to date. Wonder how all three have done since the start of the year. We can see here, here' s Amazon leading the charge.
Here' s the S&P, and trailing significantly behind Microsoft. All right. So how many of you knew that ability, that you can compare multiple charts? Yeah, let' s take those off, and to do that, we can do this. Let' s go up to these are, we added study. So let' s use the edit studies icon. And we can remove those other two lines, but a couple of things are gonna not change. As I click apply, I' ve changed this, to, oh, okay. Line chart right so we do need to change our if we changed it from a candle chart it remains if we change it from a candle chart to a line chart it remains a line chart until we change it back but also it remains a percentage so yep that' s one of our little chart settings
that we ll need to change here now, this is the this is the price axis that' s showing a percentage, so let' s uncheck ' percentage' click apply click ' ok' and there we are okay before check out to the suite at the sweet study that you can add to a chart yeah well I' m hoping that I' m showing new things, new features that you know, you don' t always stumble across these things now this next one I' m going to go to a comment by Eva; Eva made this comment before um the webcast started. She asked what my son was going to wear as his costume for Halloween, which reminds me we have Halloween coming up and what do the markets commonly do in October, a spooky month of October, yeah!
This can be a pretty volatile month, and so for some traders, I think it' s natural to ask the question: how individual stocks have performed, you know. Maybe in the month of October, they might go back. Let' s go back a little bit; let' s switch this to a um... How about we switch our time frame to that? Well, let' s just go back to our one-year daily chart. This would allow us to finish out last October. Actually, let' s do a little bit further than that. Let' s go to maybe a two-year chart, so we can see all of the month of last October. And we could zoom in here, go to the first part of October.
And one of the features of Thinkorswim is if you want to see a specific timeframe, you can go to that timeframe and just do a click and drag. So let' s go from the start of October to the end of October. And we can kind of see how Amazon did. Then if we go to Microsoft, now we can go back to the first of October and go to the end of October and look to see how it did. Except that' s kind of a nuisance, a little bit of a pain to have to change your timeframe and then you zoom back in and you look at that timeframe for that stock. Wish there was a way I could just keep it zoomed on that same timeframe. Well, guess what? We can.
Yep. What we can do here is go back up to our chart settings icon. And in this case, we' re playing with the time. So we' re going to go to the time axis and we' re going to keep that time zoom. Did you know you could do that? So if I click apply and I click okay, and you know, if I were to go back now, let' s look at Apple. Hey, there is how Apple performed in October of last year. I could actually go over to a watch list and just start to pop right on through those. And it' s going to show me how each of those stocks did for that timeframe. And then, you know, let' s say, all right, I' ve gotten the data I wanted for October.
Maybe now I' m curious about how the quote unquote Santa rally went. Maybe, you know, the traders looking to see how November and December went. Well, let' s just zoom back out here. We' ll just stay with meta since that' s what we landed on. And let' s go to the end of October of last year. Let' s go to the first of November and just zoom back out here. And then, you know, we' re going to see how each of those stocks did. And then, you know, let' s just zoom in until December. Now, I already made the change in my settings. So now, if I click on to, let' s say, Alphabet or Broadcom, it' s keeping that zoom setting. That' s pretty nifty.
That' s a quick way to gather that historical data on a specific timeframe. A lot of people don' t know that was available. If you want to go back to just doing the work, you can do that. But if you want to go back to just doing the work, you can do that. One zoom, but not carrying that over from chart to chart. How do we do that? We just go back up to our chart timeframe, up to the time axis. And let' s uncheck the keep the time zone. Okay. Click apply, click okay. Be honest with me. How many of you knew you could do that? That' s a nifty new little, not new, but a little hidden gem that I think some traders really appreciate.
Brandon says, can you narrow that down to election years? Well, what we could do, Brandon, is bring up a longer term chart, zoom in on, let' s say, the last election year, and then roll through a series of symbols. And we could do that for another year. But yeah, there we go. Another nifty little function. But the rest of the way, I want to be talking about volume. Commonly, traders use volume as confirmation of price activity or what they suspect may be happening with price. So let' s zoom back out. And I' ve unchecked my keep that zoom function. So I' m just going to go right back to my one year daily chart. But let' s come up here to our chart settings.
And yeah, if your volume is not appearing below your price chart, this is not the hidden gem that I want to teach because lots of people know about this. But if we go to the equities tab on our chart settings, all we need to do is check next to volume, show volume subgraph and click apply. Click OK. And that actually does add a volume histogram bar graph below price. So we can just go from one day to the next. So maybe a trader is looking for a breakout. Maybe they' re looking for volume as a confirmation. Let' s say maybe they were looking at Broadcom as it was bumping its head against this previous ceiling right here. We pushed up and through that level. That looks like it came on heavier volume.
So let' s go back to our chart settings. And let' s see if we can get that volume right down there, doesn' t it? But there is some distance. First of all, these volume histogram bars can be kind of small and they' re also kind of distant from price. So for some traders, they prefer to have the volume actually displayed on the price chart. So how might we do that? Well, we can come back up to our chart settings again. And right here on the general tab, we can check the box for overlap volume. That literally means overlap volume. So we can check the box for overlap volume. That literally means overlap volume. That literally means overlap the volume with the price chart.
So if I click apply now, you' ll see there' s that high volume bar with that drawn item that I' ve already added to the chart. And it' s a little bit more easily oriented with the candle. Now, another nice thing about overlapping volume is that as we move around on the chart, I think a lot of us are familiar with this data that' s available up here. The D for day, open, high, low, close, range, and was Definitely how drain the check. Go wreck about disciples by saying go back to the goal also, though up to that data Top of the week angle. We can now see the volume as well. So that' As a quick way for a trader to confirm if they use volume as a confirmation, quick way to do that.
Now, here' s another thing, another hidden gem on volume. I' m going to combine this. So let' s call it a 2 for 1 as number four in our volume hidden gems. For checkout 2, oh my goodness. This is not a setup. I did not coordinate this question for checkout too. They just asked, hey, Cam, can you change the color of the volume bars? Guess what I was about to say as a second hidden gem? Yep. Let' s go up here to our chart settings again. And that has to do with appearance, right? So we' re going to go to appearance. And notice right there for volume bars, it says color the symbols as the ticks. So I' m going to check that box.
And it' s going to show a green volume bar on up days, a red volume bar on down days, a gray volume bar on break-even days. So I' m going to click apply and click OK. And there we go. So for a trader who really uses volume, rather than having it separate down below and having it blue, it may be a lot more useful to have it on the chart. So I' m going to click apply and click OK. And there we go. So for a trader who really uses itself, more proximate, and also color-coded along to match their trading style, yeah, for check-out too, you say, you didn' t mean to read my brain? No, that' s great. Now, OK. So that' s a fourth.
It' s actually a two-part fourth hidden gem. OK. So how many of you knew that one? And if you' re following along on the archive, not sitting here in the live audience, what are you, one for one? Or are you one for four, two for four, three for four, four for four? Where do you sit? Right here. So I' m going to click apply and click OK. And there we go. So I' m going to click right now. Well, let' s go for number five. And number five, we' re going to stick with volume and price, and we' re just going to merge those together. I think it s not always a natural question, but for some, they might say, well, isn' t there some way, maybe I could just merge the price bar with the volume bar.
Just have it all displayed at the same time as one basic indicator. Actually, that is possible on thinkorswim. Let me clear this up, because we' re not going to need this anymore. I' m going to go back up to my chart settings. Actually, yeah, let' s do that. Let' s go to the appearance, no, equities, and uncheck the show volume subgraph. Click apply, click OK. So that' s gone. OK. But I' m using traditional candlesticks right now. If I go up to the chart style, I want to ask you, how many of you have ever explored, you' Ve maybe heard me talk, maybe heard me talk about this, once or twice in the distant past, there is a chart type known as equi-volume. I' m going to choose equi-volume.
And what this just did is it brought up those volume bars and it merged them basically with the price bars. So here' s what it' s doing. It' s showing us high volume days as wider candles. It' s showing us low volume days as narrower candles. Now, the height of the candle still represents the high and the low, and the one other thing here, the one other line is just the close. So for each candle, let me zoom in here. Here' s some relatively narrow candles. So we know those are low volume days. The high is the high for the day. The low is the low for the day. The line in the center is the close, and the color scheme just tells us, well, how far did we finish?
In the case of a red candle, we were down - how far did we finish below the high? In the case of a green candle, that' s an up day - how far we finished above the low. So for checkout too, you like that one? SJS, hey, SJS says, hey, this seems more confusing and cluttered. Yep. Does it definitely take some getting used to? I think so. Yeah. And for some traders, they don' t like this, but for others, they like to look at that and go, oh, there As an ice cream candle, big fat wide one. It' s all I need to know. But others, they say, yeah, it' s a little bit too much in one thing for me. Is this a sales pitch for this approach to using charts?
No, I just wanted to show some hidden gems. If we don' t like that, we just go right up to our chart style. We switch this back to a candle chart and we' re back to what we' re familiar with. But everybody, with that, we' ve accomplished what I wanted to do today. That' s five hidden gems on Thinkorswim charts. Go ahead and let me know out of the five, how many were you familiar with before we even launched the discussion? Also, if you' re familiar with some other hidden gems, why don' t you leave a comment on YouTube just with maybe your own favorite hidden gem? Maybe I' ll cover that in a future webcast. But everybody, thanks for giving your time today.
I want to give you a reminder of some other resources you have outside of these discussions, of course. As I mentioned earlier, make sure that you' re following Kevin and me on X. It doesn' t cost anything to follow us on X, but it' s the best place to connect with us. You can find Kevin on X at KevinHornerCS. You can find me there at CameronMayCS. And also make sure you subscribe to our Trader Talks channel on YouTube. So the full name there is Trader Talks Schwab Coaching Webcasts. You can just go down and click on the subscribe button right down below the display window right now. But YouTube is the best place to find our pre-sale, pre-sale, pre-sale, pre-sale, previous webcasts.
They' re organized into videos arranged by playlists, by topic, and by series. So it' s really easy to navigate. And you can also join our live streams here. All right. Let me double- check, Kevin. I know you' ve done a fantastic job out there handling the number of chats, but I don' t see any survey today. So you' re off the hook for that one, but always keep an eye out for that. Thank you, everybody, for the out of 102 people, 23 have already clicked the like button. That' s always appreciated. And by the way, it always helps the webcast in the YouTube algorithm. So yeah, if you would give us a like each time you enjoy a webcast, I think that' s a fabulous habit to have. But I' ll let you go enjoy the rest of our webcast for the rest of the day. I' ll look for you in my other scheduled webcasts for the rest of the week. I' ll also look for you on X. But hey, whenever I see you again, until that moment arrives, I want to wish you the very best of luck. Happy trading. Bye-bye.
