 And welcome back. We have a thinkorswim video today. So thinkorswim is one of the many trading software platforms out there. Of course, it belongs rather to TD Ameritrade. eTrade has their own. International brokers have their own. And I'm sure you all or many of you out there know Webull and Robinhood and all of those are the ones. In TD Ameritrade, you can trade in a few different ways, same as with eTrade and many others. You can trade on their website, which is through a browser. And those platforms are usually not as full featured. And then there are standalone platforms. And that is what thinkorswim is. Thinkorswim is the standalone, in this case, I believe Java platform for TD Ameritrade's trading. So this is basically what it looks like. And we're going to go over something that I think is it is, of course, particular to thinkorswim, which is TD Ameritrade. But it has to do with trading in general. And you could also apply a lot of, of course, I'm not going to go through how to do it in every other platform, but you can apply the same basic strategy to whatever platform you use. Or you can go ahead and download Thinkorswim. I think they have a 30 day free trial if you don't have an account with them. And I'm sure that your platform, whoever you trade with, has their own. So let's go ahead and take a look at the filters and scans, basically, filters, scans, watch lists, etc. Okay, so when you get into trading, usually when you get into through our X trades community, you'll get all these nice, you know, neat little alerts, you know, which tell you buy this, you know, sell that, etc. And while that's all great and good, the problem with that is, is that you are taking a trade that a some analyst took his time due diligence, you know, effort, and decided that this is the trade that he was going to go or go into. All right. And some of the basic things that you are an analyst will use to decide, you know, if he or she likes that particular moment on that particular ticker is let's say that we quickly go to something like this, you know, this is clearly trading in a channel, this is resistance right here, this is support. So when you're up here, you probably want to take a short, right, or as well here, take a short, when you're here, or here, you don't want to do much because you're not sure where this thing is going. When you're crossing this, this is of course this indicator here is the point of control, or the volume profile, and the red line is the point of control line, and the value lines are the two upper and lower yellow lines, which define the value area. So basically it's like a channel, let's just say it's a parallel channel, or regression channel, or you know, whatever you want to call it, a standard deviation channel, Bollinger bands, whatever. Okay, so basically one of the general premises that an analyst will take is that whatever he decides, he wants to pick the best place to take a long or a short, and when you are at resistance, you more likely want to take a short, of course, when you're in the middle of a zone like this, you don't want to take any trades, and when you're down here, you are very likely to want to take a long position, right? So it's basically short, short, long, short, right, short. Okay, so that's the general idea. Now there's a lot of thought that goes into all of this, and the analyst that put out that signal or that alert does not share everything with you, just because he can't, you know, he can't go and share his entire thought process, so you're left out with a big part of a trade. So let's say that he just, you know, let's just use this as an example. We just said that we wouldn't take something, actually you would take it in this case in the point of control line, because that is a very strong support, but let's just say that he takes a call here, and let's say that you don't have the volume profile indicator on your chart. So he takes it here, he's expecting it to run all the way out here. So this is in his view, right? This is in his sights. He's targeted this zone, and then it goes up, and then up a lot, and then it starts dropping. So you are going to get out of this trade, because you might have thought, well, this was what he was aiming for, right? But he was looking at something different, so this pullback is not a big deal for him. So he's going to hold out, you're going to get out somewhere, maybe in the middle, or, you know, three quarters of the way up, and you'll probably take what, 10, 20% profit, and then it keeps dropping, and then he rides it out all the way up to the top, and he comes out with 100% profit, all right? So that's the problem with taking somebody else's alerts, and I'm sorry that I strung this out for five minutes, talking about it pretty much, is that you don't see the whole picture, all right? Now, how do you pick your own alerts? Well, scans is one of the ways to do that. And if you go over here to the scan tab on Thinkorswim, then that is exactly what we're going to look at today. So how do you scan for something like, you know, a stock that you want to go ahead and take a trade on? Because if you just go through the, you know, the entire S&P 500, then, you know, you're going to go crazy looking at stocks, because, well, there's exactly 500 stocks in there. You know, if you go for something like the Russell, then it's, you know, it's a lot bigger, or even the NASDAQ talking 2000, 3000 stocks. So you probably don't want to just pick a list and start looking through charts to find patterns and things like that, you know, much less start charting support and resistance for 500 tickers, let alone 2000 or 3000. So that's where the scan comes in. And a lot of trading platforms, like I said, they have their own tool for creating scans. Now, this is very simple, but it could get tricky if you don't know the ins and outs. So this is what I want to show you, because I think it's probably the easiest way to get started with this. Okay, so you have, before you even get down into this section, okay, you're going to scan. What are you going to scan in? You can scan in all stocks, which, of course, is going to give you a world of stocks, right? You can scan in certain categories, stocks, indices, futures funds, you can scan in indices, sorry, like FX, you know, Forex, you can scan in micro futures, you can scan in the NASDAQ 100, or the entire NASDAQ composite, you can scan in the NYSE, the AMEX, or the S&P 500 instance. Okay, so obviously, the universe of where you are going to scan is obviously important, okay? You can even scan by industry. So let's say that you want to look at energy, right, or materials, or you want to short financials with all this big mess going on with the banks. So let's get an idea to how this scan tool works, or stock hacker, as they call it. Let's actually pick a small list, okay? You can look in your personal watch lists that you have created, okay? And I have a watch list called 2021 Losers, okay? And this is a list of about 10 or 20, I can't remember exactly how many tickers. So let's go ahead and pick 2021 Losers, okay? That's my list right there, okay? Now, that is the universe that we're going to scan in. Intersected with, we're not going to pick anything for now, we're going to leave that filter blank, exclude none. Well, you know what, let's go ahead and exclude that you could pick something like, let's say that you don't want any penny stocks, okay? So let's say, we're going to go ahead and exclude all OTC stocks, right? All right, so let's do something like that. Let's go ahead and actually count these there's 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, all right? So there we go. This hasn't run a scan yet. This is just telling you, you know, what matches, you know, so whatever net change, it doesn't matter the net change. Well, there's 17 of those matches, right? It doesn't matter what percent change, well, there's 17 of those matches. Now, what about this one, 14? Well, that's because these are, we are looking for stocks. You see how this filter, each one of these bars is a filter, okay? You see how this says stock instead of options and whatnot, because you could pick other ones, right? Not here, sorry, you could pick here. When you create your filter, you can pick from stock, option, fundamental, study, your pattern. We picked stock or actually, not we, this thing defaults to stock and it actually defaults to these three filters. You can eliminate these if you want to, right? And you're only looking at seven. If you're looking in the 2021 losers, excuse me, if you're looking in the 2021 losers list, watch list, there are 17 stocks. Why? Because three of them, K-Web, C-Web and GLT, excuse me again, those are, those are not stocks. Actually, how many do we count? Let me count that again. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10 until AMD, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, okay? Because three of those, which is what happened when we added the type, I believe, filter, or not, let me see, stock, here we go, okay? And we were looking at, yeah, okay, let me show you. When you reset this thing, right, you go back to the default. So do you want it? Yeah, I want to reset and boom, there it is, it resets everything. Okay, so let's go ahead and pick the 2021 losers again, right? And we're excluding all of our OTC stocks, okay? It's at 17, you can see, and when you select that, it stays at 17, which means that we don't have any penny stocks, we don't have anything under a dollar here. Okay, perfect. So the reason is because this is trading volume, right? And the trading volume for indices doesn't get counted, because it's not a stock, right? Okay, so let's go ahead and learn how to use these filters. Let me go ahead and pick something like, okay, we want to pick from this list, which one's traded between, let's say, a dollar and $10 change, okay? So it's going to give us the stocks in that 2021 list that are not OTC that traded today between plus one and plus 10, right? And it's telling you right there before you hit scan, it's telling you that it found one, all right? And if we just look at these, okay, this is two, but it's minus two, so that doesn't count. This is below one. This is below one. That's below one. So where's our 10? There it is, all right? So let's go ahead and actually hit scan. It's going to go and scan that. And it's not finding anything. Why is it not finding anything? Because it has all of these filters down here. Now, what does that mean? Actually, no, it didn't find anything, because there is nothing that traded. I just noticed this is the composite. This is the NASDAQ, right? It was up 36 points today. That's not a stock. That's an index. So that didn't pop up. So you see how even if you delete these filters, right, it's not going to find anything, right? Because it went from plus one to plus 10. So let's go ahead and actually change this to zero and hit enter and then see 14 because they all changed from zero to 10, right? So 14 matches. Let's go ahead and pick something like what traded between zero and one, excuse me. Okay, zero and one. Okay, 14 of them. Okay, there they are. All right, because we are including these other filters, this is one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight. Let's go ahead and delete these filters, right? And hit scan. All right. Now, what traded between zero and plus one? Here we are, net change. Okay, so we would order these. Just click on them and there we go. Okay, so what traded between zero and one? One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine. And then the 10th one is not in here because it is the composite, which is an index. It's not considered the stock. So it's not included in the list. Okay, so now we know how a basic filter works. Now, the thing is that when you add a second filter, it depends on how you set it up. Let's say that we wanted somebody, we wanted the stocks that traded in positive, but we also wanted a stock whose net change, or percentage change, sorry, line percentage change, there we go, was greater than, let's say, 1% and 10%. Or, well, it's giving you the max right there, 4.65%. All right, so hit scan, and that reduces to three. So these were the ones whose net change was between 1% and 4.65%. And there they are. Those are the only three stocks. So you can scan these. You can scan a list of stocks and figure out who moved the most. So let's add the volume one, which was also, now when you add these filters, we're looking for a stock whose volume, right, is between, let's say, and this is in millions. So you have to go something like 1 million, and the maximum is apparently 200 million. So there it is. Coupang was the only stock that traded between 1% and whatever the max, which is 4.65%. Okay, and it has a trading volume somewhere between 1 million and 200 million, and the volume is right there, 10 million. All right, if we wanted to go lower, then we would probably get one of the other three that were down here. So let's go ahead and change this to 500. All right, and then hit scan, and that didn't make a difference. Let's go ahead and reduce it to 50,000. There we go. Okay, so Coupang is still the one with only the only one above a million, and then these two are lower. Okay, they start at 50,000 and 137,000. All right, so that's how these filters work, and you can mix and match them. And the thing is that you see this ad condition group here, this is selected as all of the following. So that means that whatever is down here is going to go through each one of these filters, and it has to comply. Okay, so you started out with 17 or however many tickers there were, and there's 14 that meet this condition, there's four that meet this condition, and there's 14 that meet that condition. And then in the end, when you hit scan, the only three ones that pop out that meet all three conditions together, okay, are these three tickers. Okay, so seems, you know, simple enough. That's how the scan or the filters work. Now let's go ahead and look at, we see here what we've got the next step in our training video here is we already went through the change, the volume. Okay, what else can you do here, right? You can see that you can also add an option filter. Okay, so let's say that you're looking for options that have a delta of 30 or greater, which is something you hear a lot about, right? You usually want something, an option that has greater than 30 delta. Okay, so you say to yourself, okay, so I'm going to go from 30. And apparently in this universe of 2021 losers, the max delta is 166. Okay, but I want everything above 30, all the way to 166. And you can also drag these by the way, if you want, you know, you can just drag these up and down if you want. Let's go ahead and do 30. Okay, it's not. Okay, 30. There we go. Okay, so let's go ahead and hit scan. There we go. So these are the only three tickers again, because we have these other conditions in the way blocking us, right? But the thing is, these are not options. These are stock tickers, right? Now, the reason is because we are looking in the 2021 losers universe and I can guarantee you there's a lot of options there that are greater than 30 percent delta. The thing is you have to come down to this drop drop down list here where stocks is selected and you want options because you're looking for options in this case, right? So you hit options and now you hit scan and there you go. So now you're talking about a lot of options that have 30 delta, but you don't see the delta here, the delta column. All you got to do is come over here to the gear, customize, look for delta. There it is. Add it. You probably don't want it all the way to the end. Let's move it up so it's somewhere in the middle and then you hit okay and there is your delta, okay? And just as requested, all of them are greater than 30. You click on that, you can order them by delta ascending or descending and there it is, okay? So the coupon ones are the ones with the lowest delta coupon, right? And you could keep on going. We're only showing 50 out of 180. You could obviously ask for more. Let's go ahead and show all 200. You don't want to go too big on this because this has to fetch this information from the server and that can get pretty heavy. Okay, so here's most of these are coupon and then you can get here retract. I think this is called retractable technologies or something like that. It's a stock I got into once I was doing a stock trade. And as you can see there, there's only like one or two or three of these that are the 30 deltas, right? A coupon is obviously the most traded stock so that is why RVP doesn't really show up as much and I can't even see the other one which I can't even remember what it was. Most of these are coupon. So these are all the coupon options that have 30 delta ranging all the way to 166 but also includes some RVP. So let's go ahead and switch back to stocks just so that I can see what the other stock symbols were. Yes, Sasham chemical which I believe is non-optionable so that doesn't show up. Let me see what this is. That might be it. No, that's earnings. Okay, and coupon. But as you can also see, you know how there were so few RVPs, right? Retractable technology options also because it's a very illiquid stock. This is only 57,000 trading day volume whereas coupon you're talking 9 million, right? Okay, so you can use them to find stocks or you can use them to find options. You just have to make sure that you select options or both stocks and options when you run your filter. Okay, now the idea of this is we want to find which stocks in your universe that you're interested in have something interesting like a big net change, right? Or a big percent change or traded with, you know, some huge volume or have a very low delta, all right? But there's a lot of stuff that you can throw in here, all right? There's not just, we've already seen stocks and we've obviously already seen options. You could also do something like option and you can trade it and you can you can go something like, I want, you know, all of the options with, oh, this is very sensitive, you know, with a certain implied level, a certain level of implied volatility, right? Because you don't want, this goes all the way to 33,000, you don't want, again, this is only okay. And that's probably not a good scan to run. I should have reduced that because I said show 200. That's going to give me, well, it should give me 200 symbols. But at the point being that you know how to mix and match stock and options and make sure that it is all of the following. You don't want any of the following because then it's going to give you just one of those four filters. But it is useful, even though you might not think none of the following is useful, sometimes it is. So let's go ahead and change this before this. I'm going to close that and scan that and that's going to come back blank. And there's our three stocks again. Okay, what else can you filter for? Fundamentals. So for example, book value, cash flow, current ratio, dividend payout, you want to know dividend yield, you want to know companies that are paying out somewhere between zero and 15% dividend yield will go ahead and scan them. And there we go. Now let's go in here again. And we're going to have to remove the delta because it's going to get too crowded in here. Oops, that's not what I wanted. And now we want to look for dividend yield. There we go. Okay. And again, we want to move it probably up. There we go. Okay. So there we go. Well, guess what? It went, you know how when you add a filtered condition here, you can just tap in it and it'll give you the minimum and you can tap here and it'll give you the maximum. Well, there's a maximum sasham chemical and capital. And that's why I have that, by the way, is because it has a very high dividend yield. 15% is pretty amazing. Okay. So you can filter for stocks, you can just filter for options, you can filter for fundamentals, you can filter for studies, for example. So like, let me do what I was looking at yesterday, crossovers, that's a good one. Whoops, MACD, MACD histogram crossover. All right. So let's see what kind, which ones are these? Make this bigger because we're not fitting all over. And also, as you can see, because this is Java, Java is not all that UX friendly. It moves things out of the way and it doesn't really tell you. And so then you can't reach these. Let's go ahead and actually remove some of these. Which one was this? This is the percent change. Yeah, let's go ahead and remove these. No, you know what? I'm going to leave. I'm just going to take the volume out there. Okay. Let me see. Okay. So we want a MACD crossover from positive to negative. So a stock that is going, or showing a falling momentum, right? So this means, and how is the MACD calculated? It's 12269, which is the vanilla way of calculating the MACD crossover. So what do we have here? Well, apparently none of our stocks, because they don't comply with all four of these filters. So let's go ahead and remove the dividend filter, which is the one that's limiting this to just one stock. And it's still no match. Let's go ahead and remove the percent change. Okay. And nothing. All right. Now, when, obviously if I remove this, it means that it's removing absolutely every filter except the crossover. And that means that if it came back negative or empty, is because there are none. There are none in our 2021 losers universe. So let's go ahead and jump over to the S&P 500. Okay. So this, again, this is going to give us any company out of those 500 companies that had a MACD positive to negative crossover. Now, if you look at the S&P 500 today, I believe it ended flat or down. Can't remember. Let's go ahead and scan it. And there we go. Okay. So one, two, three, four, five. So five companies. Where did the S&P 500 end up today, by the way? I can't remember. Let's go over here real quickly to the charts. S&P X. It was, it was up. Okay. So, okay. Okay. So let's go back to, oops, to our scan. And so we have these five. Now, these five had apparently, let's go to analog devices, a crossover. So let's type in ADI. Okay. And here's our MACD. And here is our crossover apparently, but this is on the daily. So let's go ahead and look at the intraday, something like this. All right. So this had a positive to negative crossover. And there it is. Okay. There is the positive to negative crossover. Let's go look at another one. CDNS, cadence. Okay. So cadence. Okay. There is the crossover right there. Okay. It crossed down. Yeah. Let me see. That one doesn't look so clear actually. Okay. But that is the whole point. This is going to look for those MACD histogram crossovers from positive to negative. NVR. Let's go ahead and take a look at NVR. NVR. Okay. Okay. So positive to negative could have been down here. All right. Okay. So let's go ahead and look at, go back to scan. What else we can add? So we can look for studies. We did pattern. Okay. That's the next big one. Okay. So we're going to go ahead and erase the study one. All right. Because this is on the daily. And we're going to pick a, we want to find stocks that are showing a head and shoulders. Right. Okay. So this is cool. It's going to scan the S&P 500. And it's going to give us all the head and shoulders. And again, you can select the time frame. So ADP had a head and shoulders. Let's look at ADP. All right. Here's ADP. Voila. On the daily. On the, I believe it said on the 15 minutes. So let's switch over to the, so it's going back one day. And it's looking at the 15 minute. Right. This should be it. Let me see. Let me go back to the scan. Did it say? Yeah. On the one day on the 15 minute chart, it had a head and shoulders. Not so sure about that one. Shoulder head, maybe shoulder. That one's not so clear. Let me go ahead and look at Autodesk. Okay. ADSK. All right. There it is. Okay. So a head and shoulder on the 15 minute. Oh, I believe. Let me see. Yeah. Okay. So this one's not looking so good either. I mean, I guess you could pick one out from, no, that would not be a head and shoulder. Neither would that one. Okay. Let me see what the other one was. Nike. Nike had a head and shoulders today. And when you, by the way, when you cannot find these, like if it's not clear as it is here, you can also tell thinkorswim to find the pattern for you. Right. So you can show patterns and you can select which patterns you want to find. I have these two. Let me go ahead and throw in head and shoulders. All right. So it's going to throw it in there if it finds it. All right. And it's not really finding anything. Yep. It did not find it. Let's see if it'll find a double bottom. Okay. Oh, the double bottom is in there. So let's remove this one. Let's remove all. Let's see if we can find, let's find an obvious one. No, that's not a flag. Not a lot of, not much of anything. It's a falling wedge. There we go. I found a couple of falling wedges. So it, it marks them right there. Right. So there's one. And there's another one right there. All right. So let's go to the scan hit thing here. And let's go ahead and pick a different one. Let's see if this will find it as well. So let's go ahead and take that out. And it was a falling wedge. Right. So it should find Nike in there. So let's go ahead and scan that and see what it comes back with. And there's a bunch of them. Right. Okay. So as long as Nike's in there, it's in there. So you would come here to Nike. And then of course then you would go back to the chart. Right. And you could find those. Right. And, and again, you can use a whole bunch of these. It's not just the falling wedge. You can use a lot of patterns. So you could find maybe a triple bottom. All right. Which is pretty solid. Right. I mean, that's pretty bullish. Triple bottoms. Nothing. Nothing came back. Okay. All right. Let's go for a triple top. Solid to the downside. And nothing there. Okay. Double bottom. Take these out. Let's do double bottom and double top at the same time. See if it will find it. There's one. Traveller's company. TRV. Let's take a look at that real quick. Okay. TRV. Because you could spend hours messing around with this. All right. So that's quite a few. Let me see. And this is on the daily. So let's go ahead and fix this because it's selecting two. So let's find out if it was a double. I would think that it's looking at a double top. So let's go ahead and remove the double bottom. And this should still be here. Okay. So it is. It did find a double bottom. I mean, a double top. So it's definitely looking at one of these probably this top here. Right. This top here. And then another top there. So that is another way that you can use this Thinger Swim, you know, scan to find patterns. So you can add all of these five kinds of filters. You can add a stock filter, an option filter, a fundamental, a study or a pattern. All right. So this is a very powerful tool. And it can get you, it can give you a pretty decent list of stocks that you might be interested, whether you're going to trade stocks or trade options. All right. So this is, let me look at the next part, the Mac over the pattern with S and P and the head and shoulders. Right. And you can also go back, which is what I was trying to remember about. Like, so let's say that I want to double top and I want to go back as far back as 10 days, right? On the 15 minute. That's fine. Okay. So if you go back 10 days, you're going to find a lot more stocks, right? Because you have basically a lot more info to look through and find a stock that had a double top. Right. So very powerful, these filters, and just make sure two things. Number one, that you're using all the following if that is indeed what you want. Otherwise, you'd have to use some of the other two and that you are selecting stocks or options or both whenever you are looking for or using one of the option filters up here. All right. So that is basically how this scan section works. Okay. And don't forget about these filters up here, of course. And I'm going to cut it here because I don't want to make this video too long. But in the next one, I want to talk about scripts. Okay. And even though it seems like a very, you know, scary topic, you can customize these things even more. Right. So you can create lists and not just static lists, like I did here with the 2021 losers, you can create actual scans that update automatically every day and alert you. Right. Which is very powerful. You can have your phone or your email serve as an alert when the results of a particular scan that you've created change. And you can also create scripts, which can help you create your own. And I was messing with some of these the other day. And I was trying to create something like a volume, like this, for example, this is a volume average. So it gives you the daily volume, which you can see it matches up perfectly, you know, with the volume profile up here. But it also gives you this line, which is the average volume, which is the average over the past 50 days. So this can give you an example of when there is a big, significant change in the volume relative to, you know, the previous 50 days. Well, in this case, it's the previous 50, 15 minutes. But if you go for, you know, daily, then there you go. All right. So you can start to see when some of these are particularly significant because you have a 50 day big change in volume. And we're going to go ahead and when we cover in the next video, we're going to go ahead and try to create one that has that combines the daily volume or the cumulative volume. So basically, we're going to add up the entire volume and then throw something like an average on top of that. But basically, you can create scripts yourself. You can do it using the ThinkScript editor, or you can create scripts for your own studies using Condition Wizard, which is kind of a semi-automated way to, you know, to use the ThinkScript editor. And you can also import scripts, right? You can get them offline. And there's a whole bunch. There's a huge community of Thinker, Swim, or ThinkScript community that has a lot of these scripts that you can use for free. And you can just import them into your Thinker Swim. And then they get, you know, they get stored like, for example, this one VFI, this was from a newsletter, right? The VFI is a volume flow index. All right. And then the other option besides creating your own, either by the ThinkScript editor, in which case, you would have to learn a little bit of coding or the Condition Wizard, which is a lot easier, you can also import them. But obviously, the ThinkScript editor is all more powerful. But what I was looking at here yesterday is that you can ask, you're going to ask chat GPT to actually create a script for you. And then just, you know, paste it in here. So we're going to go ahead and look at some examples, some that work, some that don't work. Obviously ThinkScript is a language which is updated and changed periodically or quite frequently. And that means that chat GPT is not necessarily going to be up to date with everything and all the changes and whatnot, but it can give you a running start. So I hope you enjoyed this video on Thinkorswim scans and filters. And I will see you in the next one. Have a great.