Upbeat music plays throughout.
On-screen text: Trading Solutions Consultant
Narrator: Hello Traders. I'm Jeremy Coleman.
Many of you like to use different indicators to analyze different parts of the market. In fact, you may have a couple of trading systems. It's a pain to rebuild charts every time you want to analyze something different, which can lead to traders putting all of their indicators on the same chart. This can make it nearly impossible to read.
Today, I'm going to show you how to save studies, styles, and grids, and then I'm going to show you how to load charts with a single click using My Tools. Let's jump in.
On-screen text: Saving studies as sets.
On-screen text: Disclosure: The information provided here is for general purposes only and should not be considered an individualized recommendation or personalized investment advice.
Narrator: Okay, for today's example, we're going to use Eli Lilly. Now, this is going to pull up a standard chart for me at the moment, which is a one-year daily chart. To do some long-term trend analysis, what I want to do is look at two different moving averages, one being a 100-day average and one being a 200-day average.
In order to add studies to a chart, we're going to go up here to this beaker icon. That's going to take us into our list of studies. We see it's over here on the left-hand side. It's alphabetical, but I'm actually going to use this search feature. If I type in the word SIMP, I can come down here to Simple Moving Average. Go ahead and click Add Selected. And I'm going to add two, like I said, a 100- and a 200-day. So I'm going to click that twice, go up here to the gear wheel, and now I'm going to change the lengths of these. So I'm going to go ahead and change this one to a 100. You can adjust the colors. Go ahead and down to this one here, click the gear wheel, change this to a 200, adjust the color on that one. And we're going to go ahead and click OK. So now at this point you can see I have these two averages.
Now, this is where the time saving element comes up for saving studies and saving styles like we had talked about in the intro. So what I'm going to do over here is come down to the bottom. If you notice, there's this section here that says Save as Set. Now, I already saved this to get ready for showing you guys this tool. So I'm going to actually show you where you can find your sets now. And if you come up to the upper left-hand corner of this Edit Studies and Strategies window, you see there's this Sets tab. If I click on that, you can see I have three different study sets. You can see what's in those study sets right here. So you see I have the one with two simple moving averages. I have a sector comparison study that we're going to look at here in a little while as well. And then I have a basic stock one that I created too. But you could have dozens if not hundreds of different study sets in this area of the platform. It saves you lots of time versus having to recreate these charts, pull them back up over and over again. So this is all about saving time.
So let's go ahead and let's load that long-term trend study. It does happen to be the same as this. I'm going to go ahead and click OK. Now, you see that pulled up a nice chart here for Lilly. We have the two different indicators, the two different colors, the 200-day down here, the 100-day up here, looking for some crossovers, looking for some uptrend, sideways trend movements in this stock.
Now, let's say for example, we're looking at Lilly, but we would like to look at a different symbol. Well, we want to use the same study set in this example, but look at a different symbol. There's a very easy way to do this, and what we do is we utilize the left sidebar. So our left sidebar here is showing a watchlist currently loaded with the S&P 100. And what I'm going to do here is come to find this little chain link icon. I'm going to click on this link icon and I'm going to pick a color. Now, the color doesn't matter. You pick your favorite color. I like green. I'm going to come down here to green, and now I'm going to come over here to this chart, and I'm going to link this chart to the same color as the list. What this does is it connects the symbols of the watchlist to the chart, so you can easily switch your chart without changing the studies. So I'll go ahead and switch to green. And now let's say I want to look at Netflix. Well, clicking on Netflix, that's going to pull Netflix into the chart with the same set of studies.
On-screen text: Switching study sets.
Narrator: Now, let's go even further here. Let's say, we want to be able to switch our studies. We want to switch between these study sets. We want to keep it as Netflix, but we want to change around the studies that we're looking at. Instead of a longer-term trend, maybe we want to do more of a momentum or a stock analysis. And I did have that one already saved. When you click on that little beaker icon again, you remember it says Sets, and I could go to my stock base to load it. Well, I actually find there's an easier way to do this, a quicker way to do this, and that's by using the Studies button that's up here in the upper-right. When you click on that, you'll see there's actually a choice to Load Study Set directly from here, and I think this is actually a faster, simpler way to do this. We'll go over here and click over to Stock Basic. And now you see it's pulled up a moving average and a MACD indicator down below, helping us understand trend and momentum on a stock chart.
Now, we're on a one-year daily chart as well. You can certainly change timeframes without changing the studies. So if I click on this timeframe dropdown, well, we can come and change this to maybe a shorter timeframe of five-day. Five-minute might be a little more appropriate for stock analysis with this MACD. So we're going to change the timeframe easily. And then we can also just continue to go back and forth between the stocks in our list and this chart.
On-screen text: Saving styles.
Narrator: Now, all we've really saved at this point is a study set. That's all we've saved. What we can start doing is start saving styles, and styles really is where I think things get to be very cool in the way you can control your chart and save time. So what I'm going to do next is come up here to the upper-right, I'm going to click on the Style button, and I'm going to go down here to Save Style. Well, before I save the style, what I want to do is make sure that this chart looks exactly the way I want it to look. I want to change the background colors if I like a background color to be different. I want to include the timeframes. Anything about this chart is included in that style. So what we'll do for the sake of example, we're going to come back up here, and I'm going to go to a six-month, one-day timeframe. So we're got a six-month, one-day chart. Now, I have these studies on the chart that actually… you know, they're momentum studies. Maybe I want to use those for the shorter timeframes. So what I'm doing instead, is I'm going to load a different study set for this one. So I'm going to come up here and click on Studies. Again, we have those save study sets. This time, let's go to Sector Comparison. And I'm also going to change this to Eli Lilly again. Now, this is actually comparing Eli Lilly to the entire healthcare sector. That's what's being displayed up here in this pink line. And then we also have a relative strength indicator down below that's also comparing to the entire healthcare sector. So this is a very nice, easy setup to compare, and look at sector compared to a specific stock. It's also a six-month timeframe, which is a great midterm timeframe that we can look at.
Now, let's say we really like this chart. We're so happy with it, we want to save this as a style, so then we can load this style anytime we want. So we're going to go click on Style. We're going to come down to Save Style. And now this is where it gets kind of interesting. So you could name this… we'll name it Sector Analysis. Well, let's just name it Sector An, Sector An, right? Now, you have a choice to include the patterns and studies here, and I think that's the most important thing to note. For this particular chart, we do want to include these patterns. The relative strength and the comparison study are essential to this specific chart. So I'm going to check this box that says Include Patterns and Studies, and I'm going to go ahead and click on Save.
On-screen text: Switching styles.
Narrator: Now, let's say for example, I want to go back to a different chart that I loaded previously. So I'm going to go back here. I'm going to go load a different study set altogether. I'll go back to the long-term trend, and I'm also going to go ahead and change my timeframe. So you'll notice that the timeframe actually switched back to a one-year daily, and I have my long-term trend studies up. Well, what happens do you think, when I load the style. I'm going to click on Style now. If I go down to Load Style, you see there is my Sector Analysis Style, and when I click this, guess what? It's going to pull it right back to the way it was before, with a six-month timeframe, and both studies included in the chart. A very nice quick way to load this specific setup we want.
Now, we can do the exact same thing with a shorter timeframe, and maybe that stock analysis that we wanted. So let's go down to D. Let's go over to 5D, five-minute, changing the timeframe here. And then we're going to go ahead and load a different study set, we're going to load that Stock Study Set. So now what we have here is a five-day, five-minute chart of Lilly, and we have a MACD and a moving average for stock analysis. So what I'm going to do is click on Style, Save Style. I'm going to name this one Stock An. I'm going to make sure I include that pattern and study set, and I'm going to go click on Save.
So now we have two different styles, and I can load these and switch in between these, saving you tons of time. So you don't have to load the stock, you don't have to load the studies. You don't have to load the timeframe. We're just going to go down here and go to Load Style, and we can switch between Sector, Style, Load Style, Stock. So we're switching back between these. It's loading the timeframe. It's loading the studies. A very, very fast way to do this.
On-screen text: Setting up My Tools.
Narrator: Now, there's something that I really love to point out. It's a lesser-known tool within the thinkorswim®, and it makes this even easier for you. And it's called My Tools. So what we're going to do is we're going to go back up to that Style button, and this time we're going to go over to where it says Settings. I'm going to click on settings, and this is right down the lower right-hand corner of this settings area, you'll see there's a button that says My Tools, currently set to off. Click on Off and go to On Each Chart. We're going to go ahead and click OK.
Now, as we move up to the top of the chart now, you'll see there is a dropdown menu that appears when you hover over this very top. It is currently set to a simple moving average, and then a style name. So it's at its default settings.
Alright, now this is a little tip here. You can go ahead and click on this thumbtack. And what that's going to do is allow this bar to stay down the entire time. So when you're editing and changing around the action of these buttons, it actually makes it quite a bit easier for you. So to change these buttons' actions around, we're going to go ahead and follow this over here to the right-hand side, we're going to go click on the gear wheel here, and that's going to open this My Tools menu that lets us customize what these buttons do.
Let's start on the first one. Let's click on the Simple Moving Average. And we're going to go over here to Change Button Action. We're going to follow that over to this menu, and go down to Style. We're going to go ahead and pick our Sector Analysis Style Set. I'm going to go ahead and click on that, and now I want to go ahead and change the other one as well. So we're going to click on this one. We're going to go over here to Change Button Action, follow that over here to Style. And this one we're going to pick the Stock Analysis. We are welcome to click here, add additional buttons. You can have timeframes in here, you can have study sets, you can have all sorts of things, drawing tools. But for today's purposes, we're just going to add a couple of styles. So I'm going to go ahead and click on Done.
On-screen text: Switching styles with My Tools.
Narrator: And what you'll see is now I have two buttons here at the top of the chart. One says Sector An and one says Stock An. Well guess what? One click changes the chart around. Another click changes the chart around.
So you can basically create a set of styles that are most frequently used by you—timeframe and studies and the way it looks—and create a set of those across the top of your chart that you can easily switch between with one click.
And this goes even further. You can now single-click on a different stock. So for example, I want to look at Costco. Click on Costco. Now, I want to look at Costco and Sector Analysis. Go ahead and click Sector Analysis. Well guess what? Now we're doing that with Costco. If we want to go look at the stock analysis, we're doing that with Costco as well. So you can single-click to change the chart, or you can single-click to change the sector or the stock analysis that you've created.
On-screen text: Analyzing multiple stocks using grids.
Narrator: Okay, next up I'm going to show you how to analyze multiple stocks at the same time using the grid feature within thinkorswim.
Alright, so first thing let's do, let's go up here to the upper right-hand corner of this page, and let's find our grid box. I'm going to click on that. Hover over a few of these squares. You notice how they highlight. However, you make it look up here is how it's going to look on the page. I'm going to go ahead and select a two-by-two grid. That should work perfectly for our purposes today, I'm going to go to click on that two-by-two. You notice that now we have four squares. Well, we have United Healthcare up here in the upper left-hand corner, currently at a five-day, five-minute chart. What if I want to analyze the same stock but under a different timeframe? What I'm going to do is come down to the bottom symbol box. I'm going to follow it over here to the little chain link icon. I'm going to choose the same color. So if I go click on green, now I'm going to have UnitedHealthcare in the upper left-hand corner and in the lower left-hand corner.
Now I want to compare these to Eli Lilly. So I'm going to go into the upper-right, I'm going to type LLY, and press enter. And now what I need to do is pick a color on the chain link here, and it has to be different than green. So I'm going to click on that, and I'll go pick a random one, you know, lilac number nine, let's try that. So I'm going to click lilac. I'm going to go down to this lower right-hand corner, type in LLY here, and press enter. And then I'm going to click on that link again and choose lilac. So this is basically linking the top two on the right and the top two on the left to the symbol box.
Now, we're also going to want to change our timeframe in the upper-right. I'm going to click on that, and I'm going to choose a five-day, five-minute chart. And now guess what? We need those studies, we need to add those to the charts as well. So I'm going to click on our Studies button. I'm going to go to Load Study Set, and I'm going to go to Sector Comparison on both of these. Sector Comparison. Sector Comparison. Do the same thing up here, Load Study, Set Sector Comparison, and down here as well.
So now we have two different stocks, two different timeframes each, with the same set of indicators showing us how to analyze the sector, the stock, and for two different stocks at the same time.
On-screen text: Saving grid layouts.
Narrator: And we've created this grid. It's really nice. We love it. We want to be able to pull it up whenever we can. Well guess what? We're going to go up here to the upper right-hand corner. We're going to click on the grid box. And you'll notice there is a choice to save the grid. So we're going to click Save Grid As, and I'm actually going to name this one with the stocks included. Because when we save the grid, this actually happens to include the stock symbols. So I'm going to say UNH LLY Sector, and I'm going to click save.
And I'll show you how this works. If I go all the way back to one stock, one single stock, the entire page, if I want to pull that one all the way back up again, I can go on the grid box, look at it right here, click on that, it's going to ask me if I'm sure I want to reload it. Click OK, and it pulls it up exactly like it was. You can create multiple grids, different stock sectors, different analysis, study sets. Easily load these back up with the click of a button. Big time saver for a lot of our traders.
On-screen text: Saving a workspace.
Narrator: Now, last thing I'm going to show here… we're going to come over to the left-hand side. We're going to bring our left sidebar back, and I'm actually going to go ahead and I'm going to tell you how to save the entire platform. Now, this question comes up a lot and it's because people will spend a lot of time using their platform, creating their studies, customizing their software. You want to create a copy of what you have just in case it gets lost, or, say, you want to move to a different computer. Well, what we use for that type of save is called a workspace. And this is probably the most global save you can do on the platform, and it saves the most overall way. So we'll come up to the upper right-hand corner. And right now my button looks like a gear wheel, but on a different size screen it would say Setup. I'm going to go ahead and click on that button, and I'm going to go down to Save Workspace. And you click on that, you're going to be able to give this a name, and I could name it Test. You could put a specific date on it. I usually like to put a date on it so I know exactly when I saved that workspace, so I can go back to that specific time. But we'll just name it Test 1 for today. I'm going to go ahead and click on Save. And now at any point you want to pull that workspace back up, you can click here, and you can see it's loaded right down here at the bottom, Test 1.
So once you have that workspace created, you will have a backup of the software. You can email it to yourself. You can write it down. It's saved on this computer. You can send it to a different computer. Giving you a lot of peace of mind that you're going to be able to recreate your platform In the worst-case scenario possible. You spend lots of time working on the software, making it your own. Having a backup is crucial, and a great, great way to have that peace of mind that you're not going to lose what you've done.
Okay, traders, as you can see, these tools can be huge time-savers for our active traders. We looked at saving styles, studies, grids, and even using My Tools to change charts with a single click of a button. Be sure to check out more of our education content on Schwab.com, and thanks for coming.
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