Using the Market Heat Map on thinkorswim® Desktop

Upbeat music plays throughout.

Narrator: Hello, traders. I'm Sara Tyson. Are you looking for ways to quickly see which sectors of the market might be moving? The Visualize subtab in thinkorswim^® desktop contains two features to help you spot potential opportunities: the Heat Map and Index Watch. Keep in mind we're going to look at thinkorswim desktop—features may be different in thinkorswim web or mobile. Let's take a look.

Animation: The thinkorswim platform appears.

Narrator: To start, we'll take a look at the Heat Map. To navigate there, click on the MarketWatch tab, and then under that, the Visualize subtab.

Animation: Highlighted arrow clicks on MarketWatch and then the Visualize subtab.

Narrator: Then you'll see the Heat Map. By default, the Heat Map will display a combination of all available watchlists in thinkorswim. Basically, we've taken what would normally be an extensive group of watchlists and turned them into a color-coded matrix.

Each box represents a stock in the selected list. The size of each box represents the market capitalization. So the bigger the box, the larger the size of the company. The color of the box is indicative of that day's change for the price of that stock. Green means it's up and red means it's down. The brighter the shade of red or green, the bigger the move. A lack of red or green shading indicates the stock is unchanged or flat for the day. At the bottom left side of your screen, you'll find a legend explaining the percent move in association with each shade. Just click the arrow to expand.

By hovering over any square, you can view more detailed information on the stock.

Animation: Arrow hovers over squares in the Heat Map to show more detailed information on each stock.

The company name, the last trade price, percent change, and the market cap. By clicking on a symbol, a menu appears. Here, you can activate other areas of the platform for the selected symbol, like charts, market depth, trade, alerts, news. You can even add to the watchlist from this menu.

On the left-hand side, you'll see a menu, which will allow you to select a watchlist view, including the major indices, public watchlists, and personal watchlists. For example, if you select indices and then S&P 500^®, the Heat Map shows you all of the stocks listed in the S&P. You can drill down by specific sectors and subsectors using the menu. You can also hold the shift key and select any symbol in that group on the Heat Map to drill down further into that sector. And, finally, use the drop-down menu at the top to switch over to Index Watch. Index Watch is a visual representation of advancing and declining stocks within a watchlist or index.

Animation: Arrow hovers to Index Watch and clicks on Watchlist.

For example, let's load the S&P 100. At the top, you can see the total amount of advancing versus declining stocks. Below is a histogram of each stock within the index. Hover your mouse over each bar to display performance for the day, which is located in the bottom right of the page. Green is an advancing stock, while red is a declining stock. Left click on either the vertical bar or the symbol below to activate the symbol menu. You could also switch between bars and arrows for your preferred visual style.

And that's how you scan the market at a glance using the Visualize subtab in thinkorswim.

For more free investor education, head over to Insights and Education on schwab.com. And make sure you check out all the great content on our YouTube channel.

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