 Hey everyone, this is Dan. In this video I will talk about how to set up the Think of Swim app on your PC so that you can look at charts for the different stocks. You can download Think of Swim for free from TD Ameritrade. It's a very powerful charting software. Everyone can use Think of Swim to practice stock trading by using historical data available from the app. If you also have a brokerage account with TD Ameritrade, you can use Think of Swim to get real-time stock quotes and to do stock trading all for free. Let's look at what you can do with Think of Swim to make your more successful trader. We'll cover a few items in the next few minutes. First, we'll talk about how to set up the different panels on your computer screen to look at different charts at the same time. And then we'll look at how to select timeframes to show the charts by minute, by hour, by the week, or by the month. And we can talk about how we can change colors for the different elements in the charts. We'll talk about the watch list to show the company news. And we'll discuss the lengths between the different charts and the companies on your computer screen. Then we'll get into the very interesting chart studies, which include showing the bolinger bands, the moving averages, the RSI indicator, DMI indicator, MHCD indicator, and the sarcastic indicator. We'll touch on lately the functions for alerts, which actually is covered quite extensively in my other video posted a few days ago. You can find this video in my YouTube channel if you're interested. And we'll talk briefly about showing the different chart patterns, such as the candlestick patterns or the head and shoulder pattern. I will cover the chart patterns more extensively in a future video. Now let's get into the charts. This is my favorite setup for Thinkorswim. It has three charts. And then on the left side, the watch list here shows all the companies I'm tracking. There are about 30 to 40 of them. And then as I select the company I want to look at, for example, MSFT Microsoft, the news panel, flip into Microsoft, showing the latest news regarding this company. Also, the charts on the right side, all three charts, are showing Microsoft. On the left side, it's the minute chart. It shows the candlestick every minute. In the middle one, usually I show the daily chart. And the right side, usually I show the weekly chart. Of course, during the course of the day, I might switch anyone or chart to, for example, an hourly chart, or it might be showing every 15 minutes. Let's talk about how to change the chart panels. What I'm showing here are three panels with three different charts, although they are all for the same company, Microsoft. I can toggle into just one panel by clicking on this icon here on the upper right hand corner. See if I select just one square. I'm down to one chart. And the one that's remaining, it's the one that's on the upper left hand corner, which was the minute chart. Or I can select six panels. And then after that, of course, I have to indicate which chart I want to put in this panel because these are new panels. For example, here I want to show applied materials. So I put in AMAT and here I might put in SPY. There we go. Once you've set up your panels, you can save them into a setup. For example, here I can click on setup, and then I can save, save workspace, and then I can give it a name and click save. Actually, I already have some of my panel set up. For example, if I click on set up, it's showing me quite a few setups I established previously. I have a setup called a four panel setup. There it is. It's showing four charts simultaneously. And let's flip back to the three panel setup, which is here. There we go. Let's talk about how we can select a time frame for each chart. For us to look at the different functions available, let's expand the middle chart. I'm just going to drag the boundary lines left and right to expand this middle chart. It's showing a daily chart now. Say if you want to flip it to an hourly chart, you click on the symbol here D. And then these are my favorite time frame. One of them is by the hour, and it shows 20 days. So that's my hourly chart. Of course, you can set your custom time frame. If you click on this symbol again, click on time frame, then you can customize it, the starting day, ending day, and the time period. So for example, if I say since the beginning of the year, then I want to show by the day. That'll be a year to day chart. Each candle stick is a day. Here it is. The chart looks busy because I'd like to also show the Bollinger bands, as well as the 50, 100, 150, and 200 period exponential moving averages on my chart. And also simultaneously, I showed the volume, the RSI indicator, DMI indicator, and MACD indicator. I'll talk more about those later on. Let's talk about how we can change colors for different elements in the chart. If you click on this little gear symbol, that's a setup symbol, and you can click on here. First of all, let's look at general. For general, if you say you want to show alert, because as you can see here, I already said some alert. It says if SPY is greater than 448, send me an alert, or SPY is less than or equal to 436, send me alert. I set those alerts because those are the critical support and resistance levels. That's a very powerful tool. If you say, okay, I don't want to try to be cluttered. So I want to say do not show alert. Click on that and click okay, boom, the alert disappeared. If you look at these different lines, that seems too busy. So I go back to here, say general, say do not show study. Click on that, okay, boom. See the Bollinger bands disappear as well as the moving averages. Now, this looks like a very clean chart. Of course, the RSI, DMI, and MACD indicators also disappear from this chart. Let's get back to here. Let's show the study and the alert. Bingo. Chart colors. Let's click on the setup symbol again. Click on appearance. For example, if I want to change the background here, if I want to have a white background instead of black background, I click on this here. Here we go, apply. Okay, the background now is white instead of being black. So let's change it back to the dark background. Appearance again. Background, click on the black color. Apply okay. Back to the dark background. Now I want to talk a little bit about the watch list. First of all, let's resize the panels so that we have three charts showing. The leftmost one, let's set it to be the minute chart, and then the daily chart, the weekly chart. When you download Thinkorswim, you will see a few default panels here on the left side. You can shrink or expand each of the panels and you can remove them as well. And I pretty much kept the original panels except by shrink some of these panels here on the left side. For example, TraderTV, I hardly ever used it. So I click on this little symbol, the down arrow to shrink it. Likewise, account information, I usually, when I trade stocks in TD Ameritrade, I log into TD using my PC. I go into my TD account by logging into TD Ameritrade with my web browser that I don't usually trade with Thinkorswim software. I also have accounts at Merrill lunch, Fidelity as well as Robinhood. I'm just accustomed to making my trades directly from my web browser and not from this particular app. I use the app to look at charge and the setup alarms and look at patterns and such. This is a very powerful panel. It shows the news related to a company. And this here, this particular panel called a watch list is one of my favorites as well. You can set up different watch lists. For example, if you click on this here, it says Dan now because it's the name of my watch list. And you can create additional watch lists. They have public watch lists. For example, top 10 of my industry, you can look at energy industry, oil and gas. For example, it's now showing you some oil and gas companies. I have the personal list here. For example, I created this called a Dan now list. It's got the companies I'm tracking. Now if I want to remove or add company to this list, I click on the Dan now name and then I click on edit. I want to edit my personal watch list Dan now. Then I can add symbol. If I click on add symbol, scroll down. Let's say I want to add ABC, the stock symbol. That's a marriage source Bergen corporation. After I type in ABC, click save. Now it's included on my list. Alright, let's delete that. So if I want to delete it, I have to just click on it and highlight that and press the backspace key and it's gone. So I just delete ABC as well as AL. It is a very powerful feature within the Ameritrade that allow you to link all these different panels together. That's by using the different color codes. For example, here on the watch list panel, you click on this icon called symbol link. I've selected red and in the news panel, I also selected red. These two are now linked to each other by way of their common color, which is red. So if I select CNC, the Santin Corporation, if I click on this one, then the news panel will show the latest news on Santin. And of course, this is a very condensed view of the news panel, but if I double click anywhere in this panel, there's a expanded window I can scroll up. That'll show me at least 20, 30 news items related to Santin. And that has been very helpful for me to know what's going on with the company, especially if the stock price for the company all of a sudden moved up or moved down. You can also set alerts related to the news items. Now I can also link the charts to the news panels and the watch list. See, this here is yellow, so it's not linked to any of these two panels, but I set it to red. And here, this chart also set it to red. And this chart, the link is also set to red. As I click on a different company in my watch list, see, this is updated to that company, the news item, as well as all three charts are updated simultaneously to that company. And I've laid on to say, okay, I want to look at Moderna. I clicked on Moderna. Boom. Every panel is now showing Moderna information. Isn't that wonderful? That's why things are swimming is my favorite charting software. Let's look at the different studies. Some people call them the indicators for the charts. Let's expand the middle panel, the daily chart, so we can show the details better. I'm just dragging the boundary line to expand the chart. There we go. First of all, let's go into study. That's where you set up your studies. I have saved the different studies already. Let's load up a very simple study set, which is called simple. I created that. It only shows the candlestick chart and the daily trade volume. All right, let's try to set up the Bollinger Bands. What you should do is go to the study button here, upper right-hand corner, and then edit study. On this search bar here, you type in Bollinger Bands. Actually, after you've typed the first few characters, it will show everything that starts with the letters Bolling. Then you select Bollinger Bands, double-click, then it pop into the right panel, and you click OK. Here we are, the Bollinger Bands. Let's select the RSI indicator. Here we go and type in RSI, select it, bingo. So it's showing here. Then I'm going to add two more studies, DMI, and double-click and DMI pops into the right panel. So it's added already, MACD. There we go. Double-click. It's right here in the right panel. Click OK, bingo. So that's my usual configuration for Thinkorswim. For me to use this configuration again, or maybe later on to switch with different configurations, I have to go to the study icon here again, and I will save the study set. Let's call it Test. This is my test study set done. Now I can go back to the study icon. I can load back the simple study set. Here we go. The simple study set, and then now let me switch to load again to the test study set that I just created. Click on that, bingo. There we go. Let's restore my screen to the three panel chart. Let's look at alert very quickly. For example, if we are tracking SPY, and we say semi-alert when it's less than 440, because currently it's 445. We already set the two alerts. Let's add another alert. I will go to MarketWatch here. Actually, I need to link it as well. We can link here. I make it red, since I already selected SPY here previously. If I link my MarketWatch panel to the same color, then I won't have to type in SPY. It's already automatically showing SPY. Then I go down a little bit. I want to set it based on the last traded price. So I come here to this last X column. Double-click. Then within this pop-up window, it says if SPY is the last price below price 440, then I want to have an alert sent to me. So click create. There we go. I have quite a bit of alerts already, and they are sorted alphabetically. The one we just set was this particular one. It's based on price condition, SPY, the last traded price. If it's below 440, then send me an alert. We can set different alert whether it's crossing above and below the Bollinger bands, or if the RSI is exceeding 70 or less than 30, you can set alerts on all these different conditions. If you're interested, please refer to my thinkorswim alert video that I posted a few days ago. Let's go back to the charts. I will also touch on chart patterns very lightly. For example, you already might have noticed that I'm showing some candlestick symbols here on this weekly chart. How did I set it up? Let's look into the middle chart. There's a pattern icon here on the upper right-hand corner. I can decide to show or not show the pattern. Actually, I already have the pattern program into this chart, which is the candlestick pattern. I can switch it off as far as display. Then if I really want to change the patterns I've selected, I click, let me slow down a little bit, pattern, click select pattern. You can see here I've selected all these different candlestick patterns. I can remove all of them, then nothing will show in a way of candlestick patterns. If I go back to select patterns, I can select the classical patterns. For example, ascending triangle, channel down, channel up, head and shoulders, inverse head and shoulders, pendant, and then we say okay. Click on this pattern symbol, say show pattern. It's showing all these different channels on a daily chart, hourly chart. We're seeing even more of these channel patterns on the hourly chart that we just set up. Let's say we want to show the candlestick patterns. Say we remove all patterns for now and go into candlestick and then select these one by one, double-clicking one by one. All these candlestick patterns, usually I just select all of them. But let's just select a few, click okay, boom, here we are. It's showing the candlestick patterns. I'll probably make another video in the next few days to talk more about the different patterns.