Well, good afternoon, everyone. Welcome to Getting Started with Thinkorswim. My name is Barbara Armstrong. I have the pleasure of filling in for Mr. Cameron May today as we explore a section of the Thinkorswim platform that we haven' t talked about lately. And I' m going to don my Professor Gadget hat. I don' t know if any of you are old enough to remember an old show called Get Smart where he had a phone in his shoe, and I just Googled it. It was rotary dial, my friend. So, yeah, in case you were thinking it was really high -tech, like we thought that was quite something as little kids. But, yeah, a rotary phone in somebody' s shoe.
So the gadgets we' re looking at today do not include a rotary phone in your shoe, but they are really handy features that we can use to make, uh, better use of the Thinkorswim platform and to be able to easily access information that might help us make a decision. So let' s get right down to business because this is a very short class and we have limited time. We' ll be together for no more than 25 minutes today. So I want to say hello to Lawrence and Riceburg and Riceburg and Eva and BJ and Ambrose and the rest of the gang. Thank you all for helping bring this class to life. Also, thanks to Ken. Ken Rose, he' As a friend and a fellow coach, He' s with us in the chat and he knows a ton about this platform.
So if you have any questions, please do not hesitate to ask. If you are not following us in the land of X, formerly known as Twitter, you' re missing out. My handle, Barbara ArmstrongCS for Charles Schwab, and KenRoseCS again for Charles Schwab. And just know that there are a lot of scammers and imposters out there. And if you, if you come across one and you' ll know them because they' ll reach out to you with a Bitcoin deal, a crypto deal or some kind of private education for which there is a fee that is not Ken. It' s not me. It' So, not any of the Schwab coaches. They are scammers and imposters. And please do not get taken advantage of.
So, if you see them, take a screenshot and give it to me and I' ll make sure that you know, they get shut down. Okay, so let' s get right. Okay, so let' s get right to the heart of the matter today. Everything I' m going to cover is for general information purposes only. We' re going to look at a number of different stocks but know that when we do that, it' s just for educational purposes. We use the paper money software application on the thinkorswim desktop and know that this is a brilliant way to learn. And it s really a great platform to kind of figure out your trading plan. And, and how to use the platform and all of these great things.
There are a few nuances and differences that we' ll discuss as appropriate as we go along. Know that all investing involves risk, including the risk of loss. Okay, so let' s get right out to the platform and get down to business to make the best use of our time. And you know what we' re going to be focusing on today is this area that we call ' the gadgets.' And that' s this whole area here. And there' s a lot of, you know, stuff available to us. So, you can see that that we have this gadget up right here. This is our account info. And I want to show you how to make this private because maybe you' re doing this in an office or even at home where you don' t want people looking over your shoulder and seeing how much money is in your account.
But we' re also going to. To look at we' re also going to look at trader TV. We' re going to spend most of our time on watch list. We' re going to look at news as well. And, you know, so we aren' t going to have time to go through every single one, but we' re going to hit quite a few and you' ll often see coaches use the calculator also. So if you can' t put your hands on a calculator quickly and you want to do a little quick math that' s available to you as well. Okay, so let me erase this and let' s start with this account info. So one of the things that will tell us so this is my trading a smaller account example account.
We have $34 ,000 in that we started in November with 20 ,000. We currently have almost 10 ,000 of that 34 sitting in cash. And so if you want an idea of how much money is in your account, how much cash you have in your account, and were we to liquidate every position we currently have 34 ,000. Now, if you want to make that private, you can just come here and click on this little arrow by option buying power and then click privacy. And then all of that information is no longer visible. And again, if you' re, you know, in an office or a workplace, and you don' t want somebody walking by and being a bit of a nosy, Parker, that' s a way to keep your private information private.
The second thing that I wanted to talk about was live news. And with live news, one of the things that we can do with both a watch list and you can see here, if the default is this little paperclip and if I come here and I make that whatever number you may want, I just picked one and then I' m going to come up to my chart. And take that paperclip and also make it a one. I' m also going to come to the trade tab and make that a one so that wherever I go and I can do the same thing on the analyze tab. This is the think back tab. I' m going to make that a one.
And if you' re in a live account, well in here now, even in our paper money account, I' ve linked that. And so we can see that we have the stock meta up. Formerly known as Facebook. It is part of the communication services sector. This is under the analyze tab, the fundamentals. And if I wanted to see the latest news now, one thing we can do with gadgets is we can draw them, make this as big as we want. And so the nice thing about having a chart and then having the news at your fingertips, if you' Just on the other side of earnings, you can very quickly look and see what has happened post earnings. And so, or if you wanted to go back, you know, we know that earnings happened on the 24th.
We can just keep scrolling down. Now that was a month. A month ago, that that earnings happened, so it might not all be available, but if you wanted to see the latest news, that' s a pretty easy way to do that. And then if you want to then look at a particular article, you can then just click on that and bring it up and it will, you know, it' s saying that Meta, you know, could end up doing a stock split. And you know, nothing has been formally announced yet, but then they' re just talking about other companies that have split their stock. So we have access to news. We have access to news. And some people will leave that up and you can compress it.
When you come down to this double line, I can make it bigger or smaller. Now watch lists offer a wealth of different things to us. And one of the things I use a lot is I will come to public, a public watch list, and I will then come down to sector indices. And you can cut, customize a watch list. Now, if you bring up a new watch list, so I' m going to come here and click add. And if I add a new watch list, it will give me a default. And you can see that the default watch list looks quite a bit different. This one here has a description. Well, how did I get one with a description and these colored columns? I customized it.
And so what I did is, oops, I came to the little sprocket. Do you see that? There' s a little sprocket beside the ask, and then I can come to customize. And so I wanted to add description, because if I want to look at the different market sectors, now it put description in over here. Let me bring up this S &P 500 sector indices. So I don' t want it over there. I want it right beside. So how do I do that? I' m just going to move it up. I m going to highlight it and move it up. And the symbols don' t really tell me anything in this case, because I don' t know what S &P 500 # 10 means, but I know what S &P 500 energy means.
And then I can also come in here and add scripts. And I' ve already loaded these scripts. So if I come in, sorry, I keep clicking on the wrong thing. I' m going to get rid of bid and ask, and then I' m going to bring in four week return. So I just type in four and it' s like this four week return that I want to add. And then I want to add a three month return. And where did I get this? Where did I get these scripts? Well, I didn' t create these. Someone else on the team did. I believe it was Ken Rose. He is just fantastic at not only creating these things, but sharing them. And so I have put these on my Facebook page.
And to see that or Facebook on my Twitter. And what I did is I pinned it to the very top of my feed. So if you come to my page and you don' t have to do this, you don' t have to subscribe. Some people have a Twitter account and they just follow the coaches. And so they don' t see any of the political stuff or you can very much curate whose things you want to see come up in your feed. And so if you come down here, you' ll see I have a 21- day percentage strength. You know, that could be a watch list strip and a script and an 89 day. And the ones I' ve been using lately, are these two here, the three month return and the four week return.
And these are the scripts and they are case sensitive. So you can go to my Twitter account and put those, just copy these. You can' t actually, because these are part of a PowerPoint, I don' t think you can highlight them, but just write them down. And then I' ll show you how you add these. I' ve also done some mini sessions and I' ll show you where to access those as well. But if you wanted to add a script, you are going to come to set up and then open shared item. And then you just put the script in here and then you hit preview and import, and it will bring it in. And then you' ll have it when you come to customize your tab.
Okay, so again, you' re coming to set up and then open shared item. And what we' re sharing is that script. Okay. Yeah, Ken actually teaches a class on scripting if you want to get kind of under the hood on these things. So this is something that I refer to frequently. And I have the description in here, if you were in my class this morning, we' ll take this four- week and then we' ll sort it from, you know, if you click it, it will say, okay, which has been the strongest sector over the last four weeks, technology, then utilities, then communication. And then you can do the same thing for the last three months. And then you can do it by day also. Technology, strongest sector today, weakest sector, energy, energy getting a little hammer smashed.
Now, can you create your own watch list? And I created a number of watch lists because I wanted one by sector. And so I don' t know that I have every sector in here. But what I did is I just did a very simple search. And then I created a watch list. and I saved it and so to do that you would come to this scan tab and I' m going to compress this a bit just if you haven' t done that and I said let Set up a scan where we' re looking for stocks that are in the S&P 500, and then also I want to intersect that with stocks that are
in, let' s call it consumer staple, I' ll just pick one or we could pick materials but consumer staples and we want all the consumer staple stocks that are also in the S&P 500, and then I' m just going to do that scan and then once I' ve done that scan, these are all the stocks that are part of the S&P 500 that are also part of the state staple sector, then I can come down here to these three little lines, right-click and say please save that as a watch list and it. ll bring up a little thing saying sure what do you want to call it' and I' m going to say I want to call this sector Consumer Staples, Save'.
And then when I come back to my watch list, I' m going to click ' Save', and then when I come back to my watch list, I can come here to Personal and say ' okay, here' s my Consumer Staples now'. You might say, ' well, you already have one for Staples. I could go, yeah, you' re right, I really don' t need it.' So if I want to get rid of one, I can say here' s the Consumer Staples I would like to delete it so I could either delete it or I can delete that one or this one, doesn' t matter. Am I sure I want to delete it? Yeah, I' m sure. So if you find you have a duplicate of something, it s easy to get rid of.
Now what' s another thing we can do with a watch list? Well, if I come to my larger account, I have several stocks that are part of my trend trading growth stock group. So what if I just wanted to create a watch list that, so I' m going to click on watch list. I' m going to come down here to create a watch list. And what if I wanted to create a watch list of my trend trading growth stocks? So here' s a watch list for my stocks that are growth stocks. And then I can just start creating a list. Okay. So I have AMD in there and Amazon. Amazon. Looks like we' re sponsored by the letter A today. AXP and Costco. We just got out of FANG. So Google. Matt. Meta.
Microsoft, Netflix, and T-Mobile. Now, I' ve saved this. When I want to find it again, I can just come to watch list, personal. Ah, here' s my stocks, trend trading growth. And I bring this up, and you' ll notice that it isn' t linked to the chart. So I am just going to make that a one. And then when I come out to my chart, I can very quickly click through my positions. And I can sort them alphabetically if I want. I' m just going to click on symbol, and it will bring them up alphabetically. So I can say, okay, here' s AMD, Amazon. And let' s say today what I was doing, was going through to update my stop loss positions.
I could come over here to my sprocket and say, ' Show me my orders.' And this would show me my stop loss orders. So is that in a good place? Yeah, I don' t think I need to update that. How about AMD? I may want to update it, and I may not. But what it does is it gives us the ability to very quickly click through. Can you import your paper money watch list to your real account? And I think that you can do that by clicking share. So if I click share, and I say, ' which one do I want to share?' Well, let' s say I wanted to share, you know, these sector things. I' m going to click communications. And when I click share, it will create a script for that. And it' ll say, ' What nickname do we want to use? Sector, was this one communications? You can always change it later. Okay.
Is it not long enough? The nickname should be 3 to 30. So, that' s how you would do it: you would come in here and share, say that you want to share it - ' Dividend Kings' that' s what I want to call it; and it says here, a link will be generated after sharing, and then you can import that link to your other account. Okay, yep, so that' s how we would do that okay well believe it or not we are at the 20 minute mark I just want to have a look and see somebody said Ken is the script whisperer yes he is and and yes if you want to move a watchlist you would share it create a share and that' s how we would alguna link to your other account okay sorry that was from marketingigue you would do that.
Yes, Ken is the script guru. Yes, this net, you know, this privacy setting, it is very, very handy. Somebody' s saying they used to have rotary dial phones where they worked. Yeah. Okay. So, you know, with our watch list, we can customize it. We can import scripts. We can increase the size of our gadget area. The other thing that we can do is we can bring in, when we come to Switch Gadget, we can brought in the bring in things like Trader TV. So let' Say we wanted to be able to have, you know, the Schwab Network or CNBC US or one of these going in the background. What we could do if you had another monitor is come here and detach it and then you can bring it to another place so that it can be going in the background.
So you may want this to be a little bigger and then you can come in here and make the rest of this smaller. Okay. Or if you have another monitor, you can bring that and you can bring it. Now, I' ve just brought it to another monitor that you can' t see, but you can put it in another spot and have that kind of playing in the background so that you' re hearing the news as you go through. So guys, that' As a wrap for today, Just a few of the features on the gadget tab. It' s not an extensive review. We focus mainly on the watch list. And, you know, for my purposes, the watch list and the news are the two gadgets that I use the most day to day.
And, you know, you can have different defaults if you like, but when you add a new watch list, it will always kind of take you back to ground zero. So as we close, I would just like to thank you for joining us today. I would like to encourage you, if you haven' t done so already, please hit the subscribe button in the bottom right corner and subscribe to the channel. One last thing I wanted to show you, hit the like button. It lets me know and it lets Ken know that you found this content valuable. It also helps people looking for, you know, instructions on the Thinkorswim platform find these. I also have, you know, once you' ve hit subscribe and you can easily come to the Trader Talks channel from Schwab Coaching.
If you go to playlists and then scroll down, you' ll see these trade management mini sessions. If you click full playlist, you' ll notice that all of these in this aquamarine or turquoise color are all about the Thinkorswim. Thinkorswim platform, they' re all 10, 12 minutes long. There s one on the market watch tab, on the option chain, on using notes, on adding scripts, on the monitor tab, customizing charts, all that kind of stuff. So if you want some quick and dirty, that' s where you' ll find it. Last but not least, you' re going to want to follow us on the X platform, Ken Rose CS and Barb Armstrong CS. Have a really awesome day, everyone. Thank you for joining us. Thank you to Ken for being here. And we' ll look forward to seeing you in a webcast coming up soon. Up next is Lizanne Live. You' ll want to stick around for that. Take care, everyone.
