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. You know, sometimes you hear the expression that there' s an art to trading. Well, if the trader thinks that there' s an art to it, maybe we ought to know how to draw. So today is going to be all about the drawing tools that are available on Thinkorswim. We' re going to be looking at sort of the basic setup, but then we' re going to be getting into some of the special features of the drawing tools. Maybe even some of our more veteran users of the Thinkorswim platform might not be entirely familiar with. So it should be a great discussion.
We' re going to be going through a number of different drawing tools. Before we get to that, though, let me first of all say hello to everybody already chatting in. Great to see SJS Photography and Reza and Scott, Chris, Eva, everybody else. Thanks for joining us week after week. We always appreciate your attendance, your contributions to these discussions. If you' re here for the very first time, we want to welcome you as well. And if you' re watching on the YouTube archive after the fact, enjoy the presentation, but be aware that you' re invited to join us in a live discussion. Pardon me. Kicks off promptly at 3 o' clock Eastern time on Mondays. And as a final heads up, my very good friend Kevin Horner is going to be hanging out in the chats with the live stream audience.
Kevin' s going to be answering any questions that I can' t get to just during the natural flow of the presentation. Thanks for being there, Kevin. And Kevin and I would also like to issue an invitation to everybody watching, whether live or on the archive. If you' d like to follow us, please do that on X. It' s a great platform for connecting with your favorite presenters in between these live streams. So you can follow Kevin there at KevinHornerCS. You can find me there at CameronMayCS. All right, but let' s get right into it. First thing that we need to do, of course, is to consider the risks associated with investing. Risks are real. 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. Okay, so simple agenda for the day. We' re going to spend about 20 to 25 minutes just reviewing the drawing tools on the thinkorswim desktop software platform. And I' m going to be taking us through about the top five, pardon me, the top seven or eight tools. We' re going to be looking at how to do the basic drawing using those tools. But then we' re also going to customize and save customizations of those drawings.
And I think that there are going to be a few things here that even those who have been using drawing tools for some time just weren' t aware were available there on thinkorswim. So it should be something here for everybody. Paul, you say you' re a first- timer. It' s great to have you here. I hope you enjoy the presentation. Let' s go right to thinkorswim. So this is the desktop software platform. This can be downloaded free of charge from your Schwab online account. But I just want to let you know that this is the desktop software platform, and I just wanted to do some drawing today. You know, if there is an art to it, let' s be artists for a little while. So the drawing tools, first of all, how do we access them?
We' re here on the charts on thinkorswim desktop. You can actually access your drawing tools in a number of ways. You can come up here to this menu up here. Go to drawings. And then within that menu, here are your icons for your drawing tools. You can also right- click and add a drawing. There are the same icons. Now. The way that I prefer to do it, and this isn' t going to be the preference for everybody, is right down in the lower- right -hand corner, I can see which drawing tool I' m currently using. And I can change that tool just by clicking on the icon. Okay. So you can see right now, my default is set to the trendline tool. But I have my whole list of other tools that I can choose from.
All right. So let' Just start up here in the top left and work our way down through these icons. Really get more acquainted. With these. Okay. So the first two are pretty simple, not necessarily drawing tools, but actually sort of manipulators of the chart. This is a selection of what you want as your icon, basically, as you' re moving around your cursor, but you have the pan tool and the pointer tool. The difference here being, if you choose the pan tool, you notice it doesn' t have the typical zoom in, zoom out function that maybe the pointer tool does and other tools do. But if we come out here, we have the pointer tool. And if we go down here to the, to the empty space off to the right, we can click and drag that now and expand that empty space.
So that' s actually, we call it the right expansion area. And we can blow that out just by clicking and dragging using that pan tool. And then if we want to maybe change that back, we can click on the right expansion settings down here in the, in the lower right, change that. You can even be precise. Let' s say we only want 10 days. Okay. Let' s say we only want 10 days. So we can go back to the right. Let' s click. Okay. And click apply. And you can see that' s now back to a narrow extra margin off to the right. Okay. So that' s our first tool. It' s not really a tool that's customized. These first two are really don' t. Okay.
The second is our pointer tool, which changes our cursor from a little hand with a finger, moving around to an arrow. And this, instead of expanding that far right margin, allows us to zoom in on our charts. So for example, if I wanted to look at a period of time, back here in April and may, I can just go back there and click drag and zoom. And then if I want to unzoom, I can use the little plus and minus symbols down here in the lower right. Again, click on the minus and it zooms back out. So really those first two are just a couple of pointer features with a couple of basic functions. Now the rest of these are truly used for drawing, and there are going to be some common threads running through them, the implementation of all the drawing tools.
So let' s talk about some of those common threads first. And I' m going to use that using just a basic trend line tool, a line tool. Okay. So that' s our third icon. I' m going to select that. And when, when we draw a line and this is going to apply to an oval or rectangle, whatever, when we want to draw something on Thinkorswim charts, we just go to where we want to start that drawing and we click once. Okay. So let' s say we have a, maybe someone is looking at this trend line. That seems like it' s going upward here. Okay. Let' s go to the bottom here, back in January, click once. And then we just move our cursor to where we want to end our line and click again.
Now I haven' t done my second click yet. So as I move my cursor around, and this is not a click and drag, this is, notice my hand isn' t even on my cursor right now. It' s just two separate clicks to create a drawing. Okay. Now once a drawing is made, it can be deleted by right clicking on it and removing that drawing. Okay. Other functions are, as we right click, we can see there are other things that we can do here. For example, duplicating a drawing. If I were to select that, I can then come back to the drawing, click on it and drag. And you' ll notice there' s now a duplicate of the original drawing, and I can position that wherever I want to.
And once I release that drag and then click somewhere else on the chart, now I have a drawing of equal proportion. Okay. In the case of a line, equal angle to the original, and I can just put it wherever I want. And then if I want to clear off either of those drawings, I can right click on those and remove one or clear the whole drawing set. Okay. So let' s just remove that one drawing. Now I' m going to point out just a couple of other things that we can do with drawings. We can do what' s called activate a drawing, or we can edit the properties of the drawing. Activating a drawing is when, you know, maybe the trader thinks I made a mistake. I want to reposition that drawing.
Maybe my line is too long or too short or it' s in the wrong place. If we choose activate that drawing, it allows us to reposition that drawing. We can click on it and drag it to where we intend it to be. We can also go to the little squares on the drawing and change the length, in this case, of a line. In the case of a rectangle or an oval, we might change the size using the little squares. We might change the size of the little boxes. But once we're satisfied with the new position and the new structure, we just click again and that drawing's done. Now all of those skills, once they're developed by our artist, they carry from one drawing tool to the next.
All right. So let' s go back one more time and right- click on this drawing. We've activated and repositioned and restructured the drawing. We can also edit the properties of our drawing. Deepak says, 'Can we draw a path?' And I think maybe Deepak, what you're talking about is maybe a channel. There is a channel tool. Yeah. Well, let me edit the properties of this drawing because the properties being the length, but also the thickness of the drawing among other things, just the way the drawing looks. And there' s some other nifty tools here. So on our trend line tool, I' m going to right- click on this. And as I select ' Edit Properties', I get a pop-up box.
And what I would encourage everybody to do is do this with each of your drawings. So you get acquainted with all the customizations that can be made. So for example, I can name my trend line. Maybe I can just call it a ' bullish'. It looks like it' s bullish to me. Okay. It says ' Arrow Type'. What does that mean? Well, I can apply an arrow head on the, on one end or the other of this line. So I can have it on the left. I can have it on the right. I can have it on both. Let' s put one on both. We can apply, we can tell where we want a label applied on the chart or on the, pardon me, on the, on the line, on the left of the line, on the right of the line, in the middle of the line, we can show that label.
And our label, it shows basically the properties of the line. Let me show you this. I' m going to do, let' s do a label on the left that' s shown on hover. Okay. So I' m going to click okay. And what I' m going to do, what this means, you' ll notice I did add the arrows. You ll see a little double-headed arrow or arrowhead sticking out both ends of the lines. But as I hover over my line, I see that label that I just selected. And what it' s doing is it' s telling us the characteristics of the line. That line covers 300 days or 207 bars or trading days. So 300 calendar days or 207 trading days. It represents a 44 .
83% increase in price from point to point, or a $31 . 83 change in price. And it' s at a 23% angle or however that might benefit the trader' s analysis. So all of that is the label. So let' s right click here, continue to edit those properties. I' m going to take the label off. Let' s switch this back to never. So we don' t really worry about where it is if we have it turned off. Don' t need arrows. Let' s take those off. Now we can change the beginning point, price and time. The ending point, price and time of our chart, of our line. In my experience, it' s easier to just activate the line and move it to where we want it to be.
But one thing that I think is very commonly done is traders just have a preference. Maybe they don' t like the little thin, solid black line that is the default line. I' m going to click here where it says color. And let' s change this from black. And if you' ve watched my webcast before, you know that I, I tend to like this kind of blue. I think it stands out on the chart. Also, you' ll see that my lines are typically a dashed line and they' re thicker. So instead of a thin one out of five waiting on the line, I can do a thick five out of five waiting on that line. It' s always up to the trader' s preference. But if we click, okay, that' s going to change this one line.
But then if we go back and draw another line, it' s just going to look like the first one. So instead, what we could do is when we edit the properties of one line, we can just save that as our default. So let' s save this as our default click. Okay. And then the next time I draw a line, it is a blue dashed thick line. So all of those customizations also, but the more majority of those carry over to so many of the other drawing tools. All right. So now we' ve cluttered up, cluttered up our chart with drawings. How do we unclutter it? We right click on one of those and clear the drawing set. Okay.
So we' ve taken a little extra time going through the first few icons, but the rest, we' re going to see a lot of similarities. Let' s use the price level tool. The price, the price level drawing tool, instead of drawing lines that go up or diagonally, these are going to be perfectly horizontal lines. So if you were wondering how to draw a horizontal line, it' s that price line tool. By default, it' s just going to be a thin black line, but we can edit its properties as well. Right click. As we click, right click, we' ll see that we have the menu choices to activate it. So we can reposition it or lengthen or shorten it. We can remove it. We can extend it to the left.
So it sticks out to the left. We can cancel that left extension, but I' m going to edit its properties. And let' s say, let' s call this one a breakout. It looks like we had a break of a price ceiling right there. And a few things that we can do here is we can show this name that I just gave it on the chart. Let' S show that name on the left and let' s accompany that name with the price on the left. So it' s actually going to show the price level at which I positioned this horizontal line. Now, another thing that I' m going to do is change its style. Now we can, we can also change its begin point in price and in time.
I' m not going to do that today. That to me just is more easily accomplished, activating the tool, but let' s change this to a blue line that is dashed and thick and save that as our default. Okay. SJS says, what' s the keyboard shortcut to hold down while drawing a line, not price line to keep it horizontal. Or should I go with a straight? I' m not sure there may be one, but just switch your tool to a trend tour. A horizontal line can be very quickly done anyway, but let' s click. Okay. And now we have noticed this, the name that we' ve given it; and the price level. And the next time I draw a line, I haven' t assigned to the name, but it' s also showing the price level.
All right. Now I didn' t notice that there is a survey for this webpage/ webcast. So I' d certainly appreciate your survey comments and your feedback. If you take the time to fill out one of my surveys, it' s definitely appreciated. And I' ll promise you, I' ll take the time to read that information. But if you' ve never filled out one of our surveys before, they' re really quick. They' re just a couple of multiple choice questions and a comments box and a suggestion box. So if you click that link that' s there for those that are in the live stream and then fill that out when we' re done, that would be great. Okay, thank you. All right, so let' s look at maybe a few more of these tools.
The text note tool allows us to make a note on the chart. So as we go back down here, notice I' m just using the one down the lower right, choosing T for text note. This allows me to leave a note for myself. Hello there. Or I can write out the details of a trade if I wanted to, as much information as I want to capture here. As I desire, however, that can get a little bit cluttery. So let' s add a note here. These are also customizable. We can right click. We have the choices. We have the choice to obviously change the note. We can activate the drawing and reposition it just like we did with our line.
We can, if there are multiple lines, we can just show one line if we just want a taste of what we were talking about. But I' m going to edit the properties. Let' s not give this a name. But one thing that is, I think, fairly commonly done with those that like to leave extensive notes on a chart is if we don' t want those cluttering up the chart, we can, instead of showing the full text, just show an icon. So it' s just an indication that there is a text note here. We can just point at that then, and it shows us, hello, that' s what we typed in. Obviously, I could have typed in a lot more information. So I' m going to right click, edit the properties there.
And if I just, you know, have a great big long stream of information that I want to review next time, I can see there' s my little text note. What was I, what message did I have for myself? Okay. Let' s right click on that, edit the properties some more. One thing that you' ll see me also commonly do is I will change the size of the font. I' ll change the orientation of my arrow. So for example, let' s go here, change my text to gap. Let' s change the arrow alignment to the left. Let' s make it a little bit brighter color, a little bit larger font. We can even make it bold, all kinds of things that can be done here. Let' s click okay.
And if I wanted to, I could save this as my default for future text notes. So they would be blue and big and bold. As a matter of fact, let' s do that. Let' s save that as default. It' s going to have the arrow on the left side, but click okay now. Oh, and one more thing. Let' s edit those properties. Let' s switch this back so we can see the full text again. And now look at this. Oh, zooming back out. Activate the drawing, move it over here and really emphasize there is a gap, right? Um, Eva says, Cameron, when I you put all your comments inside of Thinkorswim when I do my orders, not good. Although there' s lots of places that we can make notes, right?
This is just talking exclusively about Thinkorswim charts. So, uh, and the drawing tools here, it' s not to suggest that this is the only, or even the best place to do it. Okay. Well, there we go. We' ve customized that. And next time we want to make a note, we can say, hi, everybody. And since we saved those properties as a default, actually one thing I didn' t do when I switched this to full text, let' s now save that as the default. There we are. Now, when we make a future notes, it all shows up nice and big. You can see why some they don' t really have a preference for this to be showing up on their charts every time and why they might want to just have it show up as a, as an icon.
Okay. So, you know, we' ve gone through six of the tools now, and we should be really starting to feel pretty good. So, let' s go ahead and do that. So, let' s go ahead and do that. Okay. So, let' s go ahead and do that. So, let' s go ahead and do that. So, let' s go ahead and do that. comfortable with how these tools can be customized. Arrows are pretty nifty. If you' re trying to remind yourself, you know, maybe you want to keep an eye on if there' s a breakout at a certain level, and you just want to click to indicate that you get these little black arrows. Maybe we want that to be a little bit larger. Well, we just right click on one, edit its properties, and we can change the direction.
For example, I tend to prefer my arrows to be pointy. I tend to prefer my arrows to be pointy. down. We can change the color. I like to be consistent, make it blue. And instead of having little tiny ones, let' s make them extra large. Now, extra large sounds big. It' s not all that big. Let' s save that as our default and click okay. And now you can see this arrow, its orientation, color, and size are different than this one. And from now on, whenever I make an arrow, and all it takes is a click while I have my arrow tool activated, a nice big blue arrows. Okay. And we have time. Let' s go through at least one more. Ovals and rectangles work basically the same way.
Let me right click or just left click basically to activate that tool. I' m going to unclutter my chart, right click. Let' s clear that drawing set. That clears off all of our drawings. And let' s make an oval. You know, maybe somebody' s out there looking for bearish examples. Of bearish engulfing patterns. It looks like there' s a pretty close example there. Pretty close examples there. So we draw an oval once the oval tool is activated by clicking where we want to start, clicking where we want to end. That makes the oval. But our default ovals are just gray. Maybe our trader prefers right click. Let' s edit the properties of those ovals. And maybe we' re going to make those, how about we make those a nice translucent blue.
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I don' t know if you caught what I just did. I won' t sizing course. I just want to make sure that my color covers all of the details here. So when you get that beautiful skyuzel hit to the There we go. All right, now we can do the same customizations on rectangles, the drawing technique is the same, click where we wanna start the drawing, click where we wanna end the drawing. But guys, this is I think a pretty good introduction, 20 minute introduction to some of the drawing tools for that artist who' s trying to become a chartist. Yeah, this is how it can be done on thinkorswim. Explore the other tools on your own. That' s what I would suggest you do.
You know, for example, maybe you are doing trend line, or pardon me, channels for the first time. How do we draw a channel? Click on the channel tool, click once where we wanna start our channel, click again where we wanna end the channel, that creates the first line. And then we just move to where we wanna make the second line and click a third time, and now we have a channel. And guess what? That is customizable. Right- click, edit the properties, all kinds of customizations that can be made there, or right- click, activate the drawing and reposition it. Click again to set it again. Yep, drawing tools on thinkorswim, pretty nifty. But guys, we' ve accomplished what I set out to do today.
When we kick things off, I wanted to talk us through some of just the basic functionalities that are pretty common among all of our drawing tools. And then I wanted to go into some of the more specific functionalities that are unique to some of those individual tools. Maybe some of you weren' t aware of, for example, just changing the orientation of arrows. Knowing that arrows are there is good to know. All right. Dragon Rider, thank you. That' s right. Eva says, thanks, Cam. We can now draw Leonardo da Vinci to Edgar Degas to Pablo Picasso. Sure, sounds good. Alright, but guys, I' m gonna set you loose. But as you go, just remember there are other resources outside of this webcast series. For example, you can find Kevin and me on X.
Please follow us here. You can find Kevin at KevinHornerCS. You can find me there at CameronMayCS. But this is the best place to connect with me in between live streams. Also, if you haven' t subscribed to our Trader Talks YouTube channel, do that. Go right down right now and click on the subscribe button. Following on X and subscribing on YouTube, they don' t cost anything. But on YouTube, that' s the best place to find our playlists for previously delivered webcasts. It' s just organized by series. So you can get into what s interesting to you very quickly and you can join our live streams as well. Alright. But thanks for giving me your time today. Thank you too, how many people have already given me the like? 31 people have already given this a like. Definitely appreciated. If you' d like to click the like, whether you' re live or on the archive, it always helps. But go enjoy Liz Ann Live that' s coming right up. I will see you next week. I' ll also look for you on X, but whenever I see you again, till that moment arrives, I wanna wish the very best of luck. Happy trading. Bye-bye.
