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Narrator: Hey, traders. I'm Jeremy Kuhlman, a trading solutions consultant at Charles Schwab for over 16 years, and today, I'm going to answer your questions about the thinkorswim® trading platform.
On-screen text: Comment Below.
Narrator: Okay, our first question. "How do I log into paperMoney®?" Well, for those of you that don't know, paperMoney is a simulated environment that you can use on thinkorswim to practice trading without risking any of your real money. To access paperMoney, you're going to go to your desktop on your computer. You're going to find the thinkorswim icon, and we're going to double-click on that once. We're going to wait for it to load, and it's going to do this every time. And once it's done loading, we're going to toggle between Live Trading and paperMoney. When you click on paperMoney, you're going to notice that it turns orange. This is an indicator you're going to be logging into the simulated side of the platform, and you're going to want to use your normal Schwab credentials here—username and password—to come in, and then you'll be in your paperMoney platform.
On-screen text: A trailing stop is a type of stop order where the trigger price automatically adjusts, or "trails," as the market price moves.
Narrator: Okay, next question. "What does the ladder symbol mean on the trailing stop?" I would preface that this is probably not a very commonly used area of the platform, but I'm going to show you a couple things here, and I think I can help explain. So we're going to go to the Trade tab, we're going to go to the All Products sub-tab, and now what I'm going to do is I'm going to enter a stock here. So I'm going to use the stock, Apple. And to pull up a sell order for Apple, we're going to use the Bid. That's going to pull up a limit order by default, but for the sake of this question, we're going to switch that to a trailstop.
Now, once we're in the trailstop here, you're going to notice there is a field for the offset of the trail, currently set to the plus-minus. Now, the plus-minus is a dollar-valued offset, currently set at $0.10. If you click on that plus-minus one time, it's going to switch the symbol to a ladder, or a stair step. Now, once you've done that, you've changed it from cents, dollars and cents, to ticks. Now, for a stock, ticks are simply one penny. Most stocks just move up or down every time a penny or some increment of a penny. If we start talking about futures contracts, on the other hand, those ticks are actually quite different. So for example, the S&P 500 futures, well, those tick in $0.25 increments.
So if we look here, and come up to the top, go down to… and change our symbol to /ES, which is the S&P 500 futures, come down to the order type, we're going to go ahead and pull up a sell stop again, trailstop. Now, you look here, $2.50 is our current offset. If I change that to the ladders, well, it's adding three ticks here, which is actually three $0.25 increments, or $0.75. So the value of this comes really when we talk about futures contracts because it allows us to use ticks as opposed to dollars. Now, if you're using just regular stocks, probably not the most valuable tool for you, but it is a very good question. It's something you have to find there deep in the platform, and I do appreciate that question very much.
Okay, our next question. "Do trailing orders go to the market or are they held on thinkorswim servers until they're triggered?" Well, that is a great question. So the answer to that is that most any standard order is going to go to the market. Non-standard orders, such as trailing stops or other stop order types, are not going to go to the market, and those ones are going to be held on our server. So you can understand this a little bit better, trailing orders move up and down and adjust a lot. The exchange only wants orders they can hold, and they recognize and understand, and their exchange servers wouldn't recognize a trailing stop order.
To explain this a little better, I can actually show you a couple things on thinkorswim that help you understand if something is a standard order or a non-standard order.
So let's go over to the platform here. We're going to go to the Trade tab to get started. I'm going to look at Apple, and I'm going to go ahead and click here on the ask price of Apple. Now, if you look, this is going to pull up a limit order. Now, a limit order is a standard order. This is an order that is going to go to the exchange. Another order that goes to the exchange, a market order. They can understand both of these orders. They fill. They go right there.
Now, if we go to a stop order, this is where it starts to get a little bit tricky. So when we go to a stop, you'll notice that there's actually this little button here that says standard, STD. Now, standard refers to the trigger price of the stop. And what that means is that the exchange will recognize this stop order. So if this was sent to the exchange, it would be an exchange order. Now, if you change the trigger to bid or mark, which are non-standard triggers, well, then all of a sudden, this is a server-held stop order that's held at thinkorswim. So if I switch over here to Bid, this one will not go to the exchange anymore. If I go to Mark, not to the exchange anymore.
The other thing is any trail stop order, all trail stop orders, those are always held here on thinkorswim servers.
Okay, next question. "How do I set up hot keys?" Well, for those of you that don't know, what a hot key is, it's a keyboard shortcut that allows you to do something a little bit quicker. We definitely have these in thinkorswim, and I'm happy to show you how to find them. We're going to go to the platform, we're going to go all the way to the upper right-hand corner, and we're going to click on the gear wheel or the setup button, and we're going to go to Application Settings. Once in the Application Settings, you'll see that there is a tab up here at the top labeled Hot Keys. I'm going to go ahead and click on that. And this is going to show you the various resources and keys you have available to you. So you'll see there is a section labeled General, there's a section for Active Trader, a Watchlist, and Charts.
Now, these come with some presets. So if you come up here to the top, you'll notice that we can go to a home screen with control H. We can go to monitor with control 1. We can go to our charts with control 6. You can actually go to sub-tabs as well using the alt feature. There's also ways to change these around. So whichever you have selected, say, for example, I don't like monitor as control 1. Well, when I click on that, I can come over here, and I can change this feature to do something different. So this is a customizable hot key. You can click on that, and you can change it to a different number. You can change it instead of control to alt or shift. So you have a lot of control over changing about what the hot key does.
Now, I'll show you how to use those general ones here in just a second. We'll go down here to Active Trader. Now, notice how active trader is not enabled. So to enable the hot keys for active trader, you just check this little checkbox here. The reason that they're not enabled is because when you're in active trader, some of these hot keys could actually place a trade for you. If you have auto send on or something like that, you know, you might send a buy market order accidentally, and purchase something. So once you enable these here on the Active Trader section, just be careful of that. Make sure you're aware of what you got.
Animation: The mouse uses the vertical scroll bar to reveal hot keys for Watchlist, Chart, and thinkScript Editor.
Narrator: I'm going to scroll down all the way to the bottom, and show you those last couple down there at the bottom. And then I'll show you how to use my favorite ones, which are the control keys to go to different tabs in the platform. I'll cancel out of this.
Now, notice how I hold control. You'll see there's various numbers along the top here. Holding control and pressing that number will take you to that page. So for example, if I want to go to the Education tab, control 8. If I want to go to the Chart, control 6. And back to the Monitor, control 1. Now, again, customizable as well, but prebuilt with a couple of very useful hot keys.
Okay, our next question. "How do I check for upcoming events, such as dividends and earnings? Is there a way for me to export this?" Absolutely. Absolutely capable of doing this in thinkorswim. We're going to go over to the platform now. We're going to go to the MarketWatch tab, and we're going to go to the sub-tab for Calendar. What you will notice here is that there's already a large area here displaying a bunch of little icons, and you're going to see a key for these icons over here on the left. You see we have access to Dividends, Earnings, Conference Calls, Splits, Economic Events, and so forth. And you can actually pick and choose which ones you would like to see, uncheck, or Show All, Show Dividends, Show Earnings if you're into a specific type of event. You'll notice that they're listed over here on the right by day of the week. You actually can see a specific day, a full week like we saw before, a month view, or even a list view.
Now, also part of that question was how to export this information. If you go all the way up here to the upper right-hand corner, and click on our little sandwich menu, or hamburger menu, you see there's a choice to Export to File, and that's going to export the data that we're looking at right in this moment to an Excel file.
We can also pick and choose specific stocks, or lists, or even sectors to look at. So if you come up in the upper left-hand corner, let's say, we're looking for news or events on a specific stock. Well, I can type in single stock here. You see nothing comes up here for Apple, as I type it in. Well, what if I click on the month view? Oh, look at that. We have earnings coming out on the first of the month.
We also can come up to this little gear wheel in the upper left-hand corner again, and this is where we can select specific accounts or positions that we have. So if I click on Current Account Positions, you notice I see a lot more coming up in our calendar now. These are only going to be events for the stocks that I have in my account. I can click on this and if you have multiple accounts, then you can choose to look at All Account Positions, or we even have a choice to go down to one of our public watch lists. Say, for example, you want to look at all the earnings and dividends and conference calls for the entire S&P 500, well, you could select that. That gets a little complicated to look at. Or you could even go down to a sector, go down to by industry.
We'll switch it back to our Account Positions. And one thing that's important here is that once you see an event down below, when we click on that event, you're going to get some more information about it. There's also ways to listen online. You can see it says listen online to a conference call, or even in certain examples there's ways for the platform to send you an alert about that specific event.
Alrighty, our next question. "Is there a way to see the specific prices I bought a stock at?" That's a great one. I think it's very, very important. Let's go ahead and see how to find that on thinkorswim. For this one, we're going to go ahead and go to the Monitor tab in the platform. We're going to want to be on the Activity and Positions to start out. What you'll see is down in the Position Statement, we have a column here, Trade Price. Now, Trade Price might not already be in your platform. If it isn't for some reason, we can certainly show you how to add it. You also always have a column here labeled P&L Open. So either of these will actually show us our trade price and our lots that we've purchased stock at.
So I'm going to go ahead and go over here to Google, and use this as an example. You can see I have 200 shares. I'm going to go over here to the Trade Price, and if I click on the Trade Price column, it says in very small letters there, View Trades. Click there, and this is going to actually open a little box here that shows me the trades I've done, and it also shows you lot details. We don't have any lot details for this particular position, but that would be listed there. So you can see each individual trade, the price, and then the trade price that's showing right now is an average price.
This same menu pops up if we go over to P&L Open. You can see it's exactly the same. Now, for example, if you didn't have Trade Price there, and you want that, you can always add that by using our customized gear wheel on the far-right side, and we can search our column set over here on the left, look for Trade Price and add it.
Now, if you wanted to find a particular trade price of something that you've already sold, something you no longer own, we can do that as well. And we'll do that up here under the Account Statement. And we're going to go up here and see where it says Show by Symbol. Well, I've already put Google in there. And I'm going to scroll down here, and I'm going to look at Order History. Well, you can see I bought Google today, and this was for the purpose of showing you how to do this. So I bought Google today, but I had 200 shares. So where was that other 100 shares? Where did that come from? We're going to come up here to the top. We're going to click on one day back from today, and I'm going to make this go back 370 days, and that should get far enough back to find our original purchase of Google. And we found it back here. It was part of a trade back… literally almost a year ago, we bought the other 100 shares, and you can see that order fill right here.
Okay. "It's the end of the week and I'm trying to find my week of trades on TOS. I only see a day worth at a time. Is this possible? Thank you." Well, that is definitely possible. We're going to jump back into the platform. We're going to go back to the Monitor tab that we were on before. We're going to go back to the Account Statement that we were on before. Now, up at the top here, we're going to be looking around for a button that says 1 Day Back From Today, and that's probably why we're only seeing one day of trades visible at a time. When you click on that dropdown, we're going to go ahead and change that from 1. Let's go to seven days because you had asked to see your week full of trades. So I type in 7 and press Enter. Well, now I'm looking at a week worth of trades. If you want to search for specific symbols, for example, I put in Google here. Well, Google, I made one trade this week. We can go down here and see this under the Order History or the Trade History. Order History is going to show you anything—all filled, all canceled, all rejected orders. We're also going to see Trade History, which is anything that has been filled.
Another area, a good area to look at, is the Cash and Sweep Vehicle. The Cash and Sweep Vehicle is going to be a running tally of all your cash numbers. You can see it's all broken down here by description, with column headers and so forth. And you can see my Google purchase here today deducted from my account. And the sale would add a line item for credit to your account.
So that's how we can look at multiple days at a time. In our Account Statement, go back and find any trade that we've done in our history of the week.
Okay, this next question comes from @JournalOftheUnknownProphet. "Under position statement, I don't know how to get delta, theta to show. Any tips on that? When I hit the mark arrows, it just rotates my positions around." I think I understand what you're talking about, and we should be able to definitely add delta and theta pretty easily. So let's go over and jump into thinkorswim, and show you how to do it. On the platform, we're going to go back to the Monitor tab like we usually do. We're going to be on the Activity and Positions. I'm going to come down here and look at the Position Statement. Now, we customized a column earlier, but we're going to go ahead and add some new ones on here as well. So we're going to follow this all the way over to the right. We're going to click on the gear wheel, and I'm going to search Delta. I'm going to click on that, and click Add. And I'm going to search theta. I'm going to click on that, and click Add. Go ahead and click OK, and you can see I now have these two columns here. Well, I only have options on one position. That's for Apple. If I go ahead and open that right here, you will see I can see my options delta for Apple. You can see your theta for your Apple position as well.
Now, with regard to the Mark Price, you know, flipping things up and down when you click on it, what I believe you're doing here is just selecting the top. You know, you can arrange positions based on any one of these columns, based on trade price, based on mark. So I think what's happening there is you're basically just clicking this… when it's a double arrow, that means you're unsorted. If you click and it's a down arrow, you know, you're going smallest to largest. If you click the up arrow, you're going largest to smallest.
Hopefully, that helps explain things for you and shows you how to add the greeks to the position statement.
Alrighty, next up @insightfulkevinlee asks, "Does it take into account of commissions or fees in paper trading?" Well, that is a question that I'm going to answer with a yes, but with a but. Certain fees, it does keep track of, such as options' commissions and so forth, and you can see a history of those commissions that have been charged in paperMoney. However, there's other fees that it doesn't keep track of. You just don't have that capability. So the answer is again, yes with a but. I really hope that helps.
Alrighty, thanks, traders. I appreciate all the questions, and I'm happy to answer them. Make sure to check out the Learn tab on Schwab.com, and don't forget to comment below. Happy trading.
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