How to Use the Monitor Tab on thinkorswim®

Most traders and investors like to have critical information about their trading accounts, holdings, and activity readily available. The Monitor tab on the thinkorswim^® platform puts important data about your trading history in a single primary location, making it easy to find your orders, positions, statements, cash balances, and trading account status.

The Monitor tab also allows traders to organize their portfolio by type of investment. For example, a trader could group trend-trading growth stocks, dividend-income stocks, and credit spreads.

Traders can customize the columns within each group (see image below). For example, a trader might add the columns for P/L %, Net Liq, and Trade Price in each group but only in groups dedicated to options positions include Days and Theta.

The Monitor tab acts as an information hub that includes your trading history, position inventory, and financial activity. Its subtabs include Activity and Positions, Account Statement, FX Reports, and Strategy Roller.

Let's look at some subtabs under the Monitor tab.

This subtab offers a snapshot of the current day's trading activity and statement of positions, including working, filled, and canceled orders. It's possible to track order activity by time and symbol and view the average price of each filled order on a symbol-by-symbol basis. The Activity and Positions subtab also allows users to group positions by categories.

It's possible to customize columns in the Position Statement by selecting the gear icon and then the data to display. Traders can also look at measures, such as options greeks, profit and loss, and buying power (BP) effect. Option traders who trade multi-leg strategies can arrange their positions by order, making it simpler to see the strategy as a whole instead of individual legs of a spread.

This subtab presents data in a historical time frame, displaying a breakdown of cash balances, order history, profit and losses, and segmented account summaries. The Account Statement also displays specific time-segment and symbol-related financial data.

The FX Reports subtab is similar to the Account Statement, but it focuses only on information about forex accounts. This subtab can be used to retrieve customized forex account summary reports, as well as reports about transactions, conversions, and user activity.

The Strategy Roller helps automate order generation for traders who want to roll their options positions. By choosing preferred settings, it's possible to quickly generate orders in the future.

The customization choices available on the Monitor tab provide a way for investors and traders to see information they can use to make more informed decisions about portfolio strategy.