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. And you know the engineers at Thinkorswim are always working to make things better for the user. And I thought today let' s talk about what they' ve been up to. We' re going to be going through five brand new features on the Thinkorswim desktop platform. And we' re going to be talking about one indicator that' s also brand new and it can only be found on Thinkorswim desktop. So, it should be a great discussion no matter how much experience you have with the platform. So let' s get into it. But as we do that, let me first of all say hello to everyone who' s already chatting in from around the country.
Great to see all of you out there. Hello there Scott and Ken, Eva, Cheese Golfing, Life in the Fast Lane, Driving Away One, Ken, Joe, everybody else. Thanks for joining us week after week. We always appreciate your attendance, your contributions. So 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 the live discussion. It does kick off promptly here, 3 o' clock Eastern time on Mondays. And this one typically only runs about 20 to 25 minutes. That' s what you want to budget.
Now as a final heads up, my very good friend Kevin Horner is going to be hanging out in the chats answering any questions that I can' t get to. Thanks for being there, Kevin. And also Kevin and I would like to issue an invitation to you. If you' re not following us on X, please do that. It' s a great resource. It' s available to you outside of these live streams. You can follow Kevin at KevinHornerCS. You can follow me there at CameronMayCS. All right. But let's let So, get into it. First thing, of course, is to pause to consider risks associated with investing. Risk is real. The information here is for general informational purposes only. Should not be considered an individualized recommendation or endorsement of any particular security chart pattern 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 principal. OK, so very basic agenda today. As I mentioned, our engineers are constantly working to improve that thinkorswim desktop experience for everyone. So we' re going to be talking through five brand new features on Thinkorswim desktop. And then we' re going to give ourselves some time to dive into a new a new chart study, new technical study available on Thinkorswim charts and exclusively available on Thinkorswim. com. I scoured the Internet for anybody else that that had this automated for traders out there. So this will be fun. Let' s go right to Thinkorswim. And the first thing I wanted to talk through is a function for placing a trade.
We know Thinkorswim does a great job of allowing us to customize and to tailor the order placement experience. But one thing that we haven' t been able to do until now is to. To set the time and force to a specified default. So if we' re placing a buy order, let' s say we' re buying some shares of Amazon. You' ll notice when I click on a buy order up here, my time in force. Just defaults to the system default day. That is the default. Well, if we want to change that, we can come up here to our little gear icon. Choose our application settings. And if we go to orders. Oh, pardon me. Let' s see. Even new for me. Let' s see. Not look and feel. Oh, yeah.
Order defaults. That' s I knew. I knew I had that stuck in the back of my head. I knew I was right. It was dumbfounding me. Yeah, order defaults. We can pop right here to the time and force. Let' s change that to good till cancel. Just for this example, let' s apply those settings. And let' s pop up here. Place another order for Amazon and you' ll notice now our time and force is good till canceled. So for those of you who maybe you have a habit of having a lot of, let' s say, one cancels other orders or multi- stage orders where we' re constantly changing from from day to good till canceled. Particularly on those closing orders. There we go. All right. So there is brand new feature number one.
And you can see it' s so new. Even I' m a little bit. Been experienced with with doing it. So let' s do it one more time. Come up here to do the application settings, order defaults, time and force. Let' s set that back to day. All right. Next up. This one, I think, is pretty nifty. Let' s go to our charts. And we also know one of the features on Thinkorswim charts is that we can see when we have an order in effect for a position. We can actually see that displayed on the chart. Now, what we can' t see are the actual positions until now. Look up here in our chart settings. So we just made a system setting up here under application settings.
If we come here to our chart settings gear icon, and if you' re new to Thinkorswim, seeing the gear means that something can be customized. I' m going to click on that. I' m going to stay on the general tab and I can check the box for show underlying positions now within this Thinkorswim paper money account. Actually, this is just a demonstration account. We do have a an existing position on Amazon. So if I check the box now for show underlying positions and apply, you' ll see, hey, Cameron has 50 shares plus 50 purchased at one ninety- nine sixty- four. And I can see, oh, price is fading a little bit under that. I can do some quick math and see the trade isn' t going perfectly right now.
We can see those positions now displayed as this horizontal line. And actions can be taken from here so we can display that. We can also right click on that position and, for example, create a closing order. So nifty new feature, I' m going to shut it off for my platform, but again, you' d come to the gear icon, stay on the general tab and an unchecked show underlying positions. So that is nifty new feature. Number two, thank you, Thinkorswim engineers. Number three is one that we' ve had some requests. We' ve had some requests for and the engineers were listening when we go to the monitor tab. And by the way, two of these features are going to be still exclusive to the live platform.
If you' re following along on paper money and you' re saying, hey, Cameron, I just looked on the charts and I wanted to add the feature that that shows the current positions that' s still just exclusive to thinkorswim, the live desktop platform. So paper money doesn' t have that specific feature. We' ll see if it' s added in the future. I don' t have insight into that, but but let' s look at another feature. And that is we' ve had the request. It sure would be nice if we Re- looking at our profit or loss for the day on our existing positions, our profit or loss since we opened those positions, how much the how much the value of those positions has gone up and down in its market price for the day.
The mark change column. Wouldn' t it be nice if we had a little visual representation of those changes? Ticks green. Down ticks red. That is now an available feature on thinkorswim. Where do you think that might be found? Well, that is a system setting. So we' re going to go back up here. Click on the little gear icon. We' re going to go to the application settings. We' re going to go to the display. And you see where it says show color price ticks. We can check that box for position statement and apply those settings. And now we see our profit or loss. We can see which ones are up or down very quickly. Don' t have to look for the minus sign.
We can see up for the up or down for the day up or down since we opened. By the way, I just set up this example account just today. So you' re going to see these numbers essentially the same mark change up or down today. All right. There' s three nifty new features. Now, here' s a fourth one that. Um. That I can certainly relate to. And that is when we have a lot of positions within our position statement on thinkorswim and if we' re looking at them individually, let' s say we' re scrolling down through. Well, as I' m looking at, let' s say, our Microsoft position, I might look over here and see this number here. What was that number? It was four fifty four sixty five sixty seven.
What does it represent? Oh, yeah, I' ve got to scroll back up to the top of the column. That' s the trade price column. Okay, so if I' m over here and I see it, I' m up $1 . 60. Okay, so if I' m over here and I see it, I' m up $1 . 60. What was that column again? That was the profit and loss open column. Okay, so there' s the scrolling that' s required. Well, not anymore. So we can now anchor these column headers up in the upper right. You ll notice a little anchor with a slash through it. It' s not currently activated. If you don' t remember seeing this before, it' s because it wasn' t there before. So I' m going to make some sticky headers.
Uncheck that box. So now we have that anchored. And now as I scroll down through, you can see those headers are staying up the top. And it makes for a much easier navigation of a more extensive list of current positions. Joe says, can I repeat? Joe, one of the nice features about these webcasts is we record and repost. We just post these to the archives on our Trader Talks channel on YouTube. If you need to go back and revisit, you can even slow down my voice. If you think that I' m going a little bit too fast, that' s one of the YouTube settings that' s available on those archives. So you just go to our, to our homepage for Trader Talks channel and go to the playlist.
You can find it right there. You like that one, Eva, that anchor? Yeah, I like that too. Might leave that one on. Although then I' ll have to explain it every time for my audience. This is a feature only currently available online. Just so you know, if you' re trying to do it on your paper money, it' s not there. Can I say yet question mark? I don' t know. We' ll see. Okay. One more. And then I. m going to show you a new tool. Let' s go to our charts and over here to the right, when we' re looking at a stock on the charts, there are all kinds of features over here that a lot of you are already familiar with.
Like for example, if I click on the little trade button up at the top, it gives me this static bar. It allows me to go from one stock to the next. Like let' s flip over here to Nvidia, but it just leaves these buttons here for trading purposes. Well, there' s a new button here. That allows us to access our option chain OC over there to the right. Right down below this displays the option chain so that we can track options quotes right along with our stock chart. We can resize this options chain if we need a little bit more space. And yes, it is a fully tradable options chain. Now, obviously this is a feature that' s more interesting to options traders.
But for example, if I wanted to buy a Nvidia 19 the July call I could just come right down here click and start to place that trade I can confirm and send. Okay not going to do that today. Anytime we' re placing a trade though we do need to be aware of any associated commissions and different features of trading have different things that we need to be aware of. That was a very quick demonstration. All right. But that is new. And I think for a lot of our options traders there, they might find some very good use in that. All right. Nifty new feature on Thinkorswim number five, all of them pretty easy. All of them I think pretty intuitive, but there' s one new thing that I wanted to spend just a little bit more time on, a few minutes.
And that is a new indicator. Let' s go to our little studies icon here. And how about we stick with Nvidia just for convenience purposes. And I' m going to start to type in the word price. And right down here is our new indicator. Just rolls off the tongue. Price, time, filtering, bar count. Okay. Someone probably could have done with a little bit of abbreviation for this indicator, but that' s what it' s called. Price, time, filtering, bar count. I' m going to add that to our chart and apply it. And I just wanted to quickly show you how it works. And by the way, there is a survey for this webcast. Thank you for pointing that out, Eva.
Guys, if you haven' t ever filled out one of our surveys before, those that are attending the live stream can click on the link in the chat right now, fill it out. We' re going to have a big survey to do that when we' re done. But it. So only two multiple- choice questions, a comments box and a suggestion box. And if you take the time to fill it out, I promise I' ll take the time to read it. It definitely helps. Okay. Thanks for doing that for me. But back to our price, time, filtering, bar count indicator. We just added this to the chart. And to me, it' s visually a fairly straightforward indicator. And actually in its construction, it' s quite straightforward as well.
Basically, what this does is it operates on the simple premise that if the closing price on a stock is higher than last week' s high, what implications might that have for the trend? And what if each week we' re closing above the previous week' s high point? We probably have an intact upward trend. Well, this just spells that out as a histogram, first of all, so that we can see when these sorts of trends started when we had that first closing value at the end of the week above the previous week' s high. And then it just continues from day to day, giving us a new histogram that' s taller than the last as long as that trend persists.
And the moment we get a closing price, the week that we get a closing price that' s lower than the previous week' s high, it just switches right to red and gives a trend indication the opposite direction. So for some traders, they may have been calculating this manually. It' s sort of a longer term. It' s a long-held premise. It' s not that the premise itself is new, but the indicator, the automation of that logic, first time found online, it' s really an exclusive right here on Thinkorswim, so I think that' s fabulous. But a trader may just use, as with other indicators, they could be used in isolation, conceptually. More likely they' re going to be combined with others. technical tools.
But the bottom line with this indicator is our trader might be looking at: as long as this has green bars and it' s going up, they may have a bullish outlook on that stock. If we switch to red bars and also we visually see that represented on the candles, maybe that' s a time to hit the brakes on maybe an existing position or just hold off on a new position. All right. Harry says, is this the week indicator versus the date? So yeah, yeah, it can be used daily or weekly chart as long as we stick with the current construction. If we were to switch over to weekly, it' s just going to compress these daily charts. It' s going to look basically the same.
So if I were to switch this to weekly, you can see the indication is basically the same, but this is now looking back over a much longer period, right? But basically those are the four weeks that are represented on our day chart. Right here. Yeah. Same basic interpretation. Can this conceptually be applied to different timeframes? Yes. Is there a guarantee that it' s going to perform on every timeframe or for any given trade? Nope. No indicator comes with a guarantee, but I will say quite commonly with these sorts of indicators, they' re combined with, let' s say another trend filtering indicator, like a moving average. So for example, maybe a trader might apply just a simple moving average, how about I switch this to, let' s say a 50 day.
Let' s click. Okay. Click apply. This is getting a little bit deeper for those that aren' t terribly familiar with charts, but I don' t mind indulging. We did the quick five new features. I don' t mind going a little bit deeper into this indicator, but yeah. So, um, a technical trader here may look first to confirm that our 50- period moving average is at least moving up like back here. It wasn' t. So basically one trend indicator, saying, oh, that trend' s not good. Our other trend indicator showing signs of life, but, but our trader may wait for the 50 to start tilting upward. And then at that point, start taking signals from our, um, from our, our lower study indicator.
So right here, for example, we have an upward sloping 50 period moving average, and there' s sort of an entry signal terminating over here with our exit on NVIDIA. New entry here, new exit right there. And so we' re going to wait for the 50 to start tilting upward. And then at that point, start tilting upward. And so on. They' re not always going to work out. Those are a couple of good examples on NVIDIA by chance, but there we go. So guys, in just 20 minutes, I' ve given you that introduction to five new features on Thinkorswim plus a new exclusive indicator. Yep. Not, uh, not the easiest, uh, indicator to name the price time filtering bar count indicator, but we now know, uh, what it is, how it' s constructed and how it might be used.
Time for me to let you go enjoy, uh, Lizanne live. She' s coming right up here. But as I let you go, just bear in mind, there are resources outside of today' s discussion. First being make sure that you' re following Kevin and me on X. Okay. You can find Kevin there at KevinHornerCS. I can be found on X at CameronMayCS, but this is where we might go and post our thoughts about market developments. We might let you know about our weekends. We had a long weekend. We had a long weekend this last weekend. Um, it s best place to connect with, uh, with us in between the live streams doesn' t cost anything. So might as well, right? Also make sure that you' re subscribed to our trader talks channel.
Somebody asked earlier, Hey, Cameron, can you go back and repeat what you said? Yep. I can on a continual loop through the archives here. So, um, you can go down right below the display window right now, click on subscribe. It doesn' t cost anything, but it, it subscribes you to our channel. You get notifications. You get notifications. You get notifications. You get notifications about new release webcasts. And also, this is YouTube; it' s a place to come to find our playlist of previous webcasts, where you can join the live streams. Great resource there, all provided at no cost to you. So, hope you take advantage. It also helps our channel find a wider audience. The more subscribers, the better, but, uh, thank you to how many of you; I know you' ve got over, we' ve got over a hundred people watching 126 people watching.
I' ve already clicked the like button. If you like these webcasts, make sure you' re clicking the like button; that' s always appreciated. Go enjoy Lizanne, but we' ve, we' ve accomplished what I wanted to do today: The five brand new features. We looked at them on, we looked at a new charting tool on Thinkorswim and even got some application with some example indicators. So there you go. You' re now updated on Thinkorswim' s new features. I will see you next week. I' ll also look for you in my other webcasts throughout the week, and I' ll look for you on X, but whenever I see you again, until that moment arrives, I want to wish you all the best. Very best of luck. Happy trading. Bye -bye.
