 What's up everybody? It's Stas here and in this video we're going to be doing a think or swim tutorial so you could get a basic understanding of how to use this platform by TD Ameritrade for your stock market trading needs, your stock market investing needs, or a little bit of both. If you do both stock market investing and stock market trading. So the goal of this video, the basis of this video is for you to get an understanding of how to make a watch list, how to scan for stocks, how to set up indicators, and use a bunch of other tools here on this platform so you can literally download it and hit the ground running with all of your trading and stock market needs. And by the way, this is not a sponsored video whatsoever. I personally use this platform every single day and I get a lot of questions from the community of how to do this, how to do that, so I hope to answer those questions in this video. So if you find value in this video, it took me a while to make this and put this together. So go down below. If you want to hit that like button, I would greatly appreciate it and consider subscribing if you do want to see further content about the stock market investing and trading. This is the channel for you. So let's get into it guys. So overall, once you download, think or swim, this is kind of what it's going to look like, right? When you open it up initially, you're not going to have indicators, right? It's going to look more like this. Let me pull this one up for you. It's going to look like this. Let's say for example, I do SPX here, the S&P 500. It's going to look like this. You don't really see any moving averages here. You don't see an RSI. You don't really see an EMA, right? So we're going to show you, I'm going to show you in a couple of minutes on how to set that up. But just a little forewarning here. That is what it's going to look like when you open it up initially, right? Once you set up all of your indicators, all that fun stuff, you're going to have this platform, right? You're going to have your chart here. You're going to have watchlists here on the left and a bunch of other tabs that we're going to talk about as well, such as scanning for stocks. You're going to have that here. If we go back to charts, you'll see that. You'll have a bunch of tools, right? You're going to have on the right side here, Active Trader, which is important if you're going to be trading with TD Ameritrade. You're going to have times and sales. You're going to be able to trade here on top. You're going to have a level two, which is a bit more advanced. And if you're looking at any specific stock, you can look at live news regarding that stock or any index that you do have pulled up. But before we do get into all of those different topics, let's start off with how to create a watchlist. This is very, very basic, but it's important if you want to be organized with either long-term investments, you want to have long-term investments in one little section of your watchlist. You want to have, let's say, short plays in one. You want to have day trading watchlists, swing trading watchlists. It's important to have things broken down rather and organized. So let's create a watchlist, guys. Let's pull up one here. So you guys see I have a Market ETFs watchlist here with a bunch of these volatility and Market ETFs. But if you want to create a watchlist from scratch, all you have to do is go to this left platform here, this left side, you hit onto this little button here. I'm sure there's going to be one watchlist for you guys. If you're just starting out, you'll be able to click that, which is the little indexes button here, which is the name of the watchlist. Then you can go down to create watchlist, right? And you can name it anything, right? We talked about how you have one for day trading, swing trading, long-term investing, maybe short plays, whatever it may be. Let's say we name this one, okay, short-term investments. Short-term trades. How about that? Short-term trades. So now we can put in whatever tickers we want, right? Let's say we want Chipotle Mexican Grill. Let's say we want PayPal, Enter. Let's say we want AT&T. Let's say we want Procter & Gamble. It can be anything, right? Whatever stocks you see potential in for the short-term, whatever short-term means to you, that could be five days, 10 days, a month, two months, whatever it may be. Put them into this watchlist, right? Let's say you want Google, we'll put in Google, and you kind of get the point, right? You just add them, add symbols, however many you want, and then you click Save, and it's going to replace that little section with the watchlist you created. And of course, as you create more watchlists, you guys can see my personal watchlists. If I pull them up for you, I have Active, Banking, Chinese, Dividend, Yield, Indexes, International ETFs. As you create more, you can just fill them in the bottom here and really just have whichever watchlist you want showing, and then if you want to flip-flop them, you'll go to Personal here and then pick whichever one you want to replace. So let's say you want Weedstocks now here, you can do that. Let's say I want, instead of marketing ETFs, I want to do long-term ETFs. I could put those here as well. So it's cool, you can break it down. It's super important to have everything organized. This way, you're ready to go when the market opens, when you're looking to pick a stock and watch a stock for a potential entry point, and you have everything organized, you know where everything is. So the next thing I want to talk about, which actually ties in with creating a watchlist, is scanning for stocks. Because if you're interested in creating a watchlist with a specific criteria in terms of the stock itself, scanning for stocks will allow you to make a filterized criteria, which you can then funnel into a watchlist and then watch those stocks over time in the watchlist. So on thinkorswim, you want to come up here and hit the scan button. And this will pull up a cool little tool here, which again, you can punch in a bunch of different criteria, a bunch of filters to filter out the specific stocks you want based on that criteria. So this scanner I have, and you guys can do a bunch of different filters and there's so much stuff to do with this scanner, but this is a basic one, right? This one here is showing the last price of the stock. This is the first criteria. We want it to be a minimum of 20, maximum of 40, and this is the price, right? Between 20 and $40. We want the volume here, which is the second filter to be a minimum of one million. We want some volume in the stock. We don't want any of these low volume stocks. We want at least one million, right? That's a pretty, pretty solid range of volume with a maximum of 200 million, which is a lot, a lot of volume. The third criteria here is beta, right? And beta is pretty much how volatile a stock is. We have a beta minimum of negative one, maximum of four. So in all, we have a match of around 18,000 stocks. So now, when we click scan, guys, you can see all of the stocks that are matching this criteria, they're being pulled up. And you can notice how none of them are over $40 and none of them are under $20, right? Because of that 20 to 40 criteria, the volume is where we want it and the beta is as well. So now our job is to go through these, break down some charts and analyze them and maybe do further fundamental analysis to potentially invest in them. And again, break down charts if you want to short-term trade them. So what would you do now, right? You wanna look at JD.com, for example, you'd go back to charts, you'd type in JD and then you'd break it down and you'd do that for all of the stocks. And of course, you can do, again, like I said, a bunch of other filters. You can do whatever you want, really, right? Instead of beta, you can do EPS, you can do yield. If you wanted to dividend yield, you can do percentage change, volume, literally whatever you want, guys. And you can just filter through it, right? You can just filter through it. If we just go back to what I just did here, another cool thing you can do, guys, which I'm sure you probably already know, is you can just click on the top here and you can see which ones have lost the most value for that particular day, which ones have gained the most value for that particular day. In this case, it's Dova, it's up 38%, up $7 today. You can see which ones have the most volume, least volume, et cetera. So this is very important in terms of creating a watch list and looking at a bunch of new stocks on a day-to-day basis and potentially finding that next breakout. So now going back to the charts, I want to show you guys some basic drawing tools to help you draw out important levels on whatever stock, index, ETF, future that you are breaking down. So on the SPX here, the S&P 500, you see a bunch of these lines drawn out across which are levels of support and levels of resistance. So if I quickly clear this drawing set and by the way, guys, to clear a drawing set, all you have to do is, oops, that was a mistake. Let me go back here. All you have to do is right-click on the screen wherever it may be on the chart and go to clear drawing set. That should erase all the trend lines. So all you have are the candlesticks and the moving averages, whatever moving averages you have set up. So the drawing tools that I mostly use are listed here and I'll show you guys. The trend line tool, which is the one I have now, which allows me to see, okay, how much percentage value is, what percentage profit is there from this level to the next resistance, which in this case from 29.70 up to the all-time high, 30, 27 is around 2%. You guys can see it says 1.92 right there. Let's say the S&P were to drop to 2800. How much of a drop would that be on a percentage basis? 4.6%, right? This is an important tool to really see, how much potential drop does a stock have potentially, right? How much upside it has on a percentage basis? I use this for that, right? I also use this to draw basic trend lines, whether it be something like that, maybe a resistance line like this or maybe a support line, stuff like that. Basic, basic stuff is what I use this trend line drawing tool for. What I also use in terms of support and resistance, which I think is much easier because it's a straight line, is this tool with a dollar sign on top and a line under it? It's pretty much a dollar sign sitting on top of a line. I use this to draw out basic support and resistance levels, right? You guys can see, you know, this level 29.50, that's a strong support on the S&P. The next level we can see is maybe around, let's say, 28.50, that level right there. Another one that I can draw out is around 27.30 and you guys can see the point, right? Drawing out levels is super important to see where a stock index, ETF, a future could potentially go. So you can plan your trades accordingly. So this next tool that I use all the time is called the channel tool. This is the tool right here. It's pretty much two parallel lines that are uptrending, right? You click this and it allows you to draw out channels on whatever you're analyzing. So you can see, okay, is this trading in a particular range, which it seems like the S&P is. You guys can see it's clearly in this channel where it's making higher highs and higher lows and staying within this uptrend range. And then you can be like, okay, when you're doing your analysis, drawing out these channels, you can be like, okay, if the S&P were to break below this channel trend line support, that's pretty bearish, right? This could be heading down to maybe 28.50, which these other tools come into play now, which if we were to break this level, again the support of the channel, we could be heading down to here, which is a 28.50 support and ultimately the uptrend at that point would be broken. And on the flip side, let's say we started to trend up to go and test the resistance of this channel and we broke out of it, that would be a massive bullish move, meaning we may be hitting all-time highs, we may be breaking out and going to another high level on the S&P or whatever chart you are analyzing in your particular case. So in terms of drawing tools guys, those are the basics, right? There's Fibonacci retracements, that's a bit more complicated. There's a bunch of other things here. You know, you have an arrow, all these tools down here, you know, cycle brackets, Fibonacci spiral. This is stuff that, again, is not probably for the basic user out there because again, this is a basic video, so I do want to stick to the basics, but you have a lot of options when you're using this platform and I figured why not just tell you about them. So drawing tools, that's what I use and that should help you in your analysis, drawing out supports, drawing out resistance levels on whatever charts that you are watching. So let's talk about indicators and how you can set up your EMA lines, your SMA lines, your RSI, your MACD, your volume, so we can look like the left side of the screen right now, right? This is what you want it to look like, but like I mentioned in the beginning of the video, if you download this platform, when you download it and you just start out, this is what it's going to look like. Pretty bare bones, just candlesticks and volume at the bottom, right? This is what it's going to look like. So you're going to need to set up some indicators and I'll show you guys how I set up mine. All you're going to need to do is when you get into your platform, go to the top and you'll see this button here. It kind of looks like a chemistry tube says analysis tools. You click analysis tools and then you go to edit studies. You click edit studies and now you have all of these indicators just sitting here and you're like, okay, what do I do? Well, I personally have my setup, which if I click this, it's going to pull up the indicators that I have on the left side of the screen which makes it easier once you do have a set, but if you don't have a set, which you won't, if you're just starting out with think or swim, you're going to need to do this, right? You're going to need to fix this. So what you want to do is type in simple. Simple is going to pull up a simple moving average for you, right? You're going to also want to type in exponential. This is going to pull up an exponential moving average for you and you can actually, you know, fix all the lengths of these. If you want it to be, you know, 180, you can do a 180 simple moving average. You click okay. Let's say you want to do a 50 simple moving average. You can do another simple, simple moving average. And then we do, let's see, click it, double click that. And then you go to the length here. And by the way guys, the length, all it is, it's kind of like the days that it's tracking. So 50 simple moving average is a 50 day SMA. It's pretty much taking the price of the stock and the previous 50 days and averaging it down and smoothing it over this moving average, which is going to be that trend line. And of course you want to pick whatever colors. Let's say we do the 50 SMA is green here. We'll do the 180 SMA as yellow and then we'll do the exponential moving average as light blue. I guess we'll just leave it like that. So you have an exponential moving average, which is the quickest reacting moving average. This is for more short-term trades, intraday stuff because it's moving quicker. It's tracking that price quicker. You have the 50 and the 180 SMAs, which these are mostly for kind of longer-term trend analysis, probably the 20 day. Of course, you can use it on intraday charts as well, but mostly for some longer-term trend analysis like 90 days, 180 days, one year, stuff like that. On volume, you can have, let's say the RSI. RSI, that could be with the volume, the RSI. And we have it, I personally use it with the default filters here, overboughts at 70, oversold is at 30. So pretty much when the line is getting closer to 70, that stock is more overbought. When it's getting closer to 30, that stock is more oversold. And let's say you want to do a MACD as well. We could put that in the lower. So now we click okay and take a look at it guys. We have moving averages set up. We have the MACD, the RSI. We have volume because that was already, it's in there as a, it's already there. Honestly guys, you don't even have to set it. You don't have to set it up in terms of the volume and they already have it in there. And you have all of the moving averages, the 50 SMA, EMA, 180 SMA, and you're good to go in terms of indicators. So now that we nailed down some basics of how to make a watch list, how to scan for stocks, how to set up your indicators, the way I personally have them, let's talk about some other tools very quickly before I do end off this video. So the first one I want to talk about, probably an important one to have is how to set an alert. And an alert is important, especially if you're short-term trading stocks or you want to buy a stock at a particular price. So let's say we have Kronos here pulled up, ticker symbol C-R-O-N, the infamous marijuana company. Let's say I want to build a position in Kronos stock. If it breaks above, let's say $12.50. And why $12.50 guys? Because at that point, this stock, the price action, is going to be breaking above moving averages, which are acting as resistances right now. And that's going to be the first step, in my opinion, to a breakout stock. If a stock's breaking out of moving averages that have been resistances over the past couple of months, that's going to lead me to believe that there's more upside in this particular stock. So I would want it to alert me if it's breaking out of there so I can catch it at a good time. And if you guys actually have the think or swim app on your cell phone, your smartphone, whatever phone you have, this is actually very good as well because it will send you alerts to your phone and you can look at it on your phone if that is how you set it up. But obviously, this is a desktop video strictly. So on the desktop, all you have to do is right click and you go down here to create alert and you see the bell, right? You see the bell and now you have your symbol here. You have mark or rather the price. Mark is at or above 12.54. So this is actually where we want it, 12.50. So this is going to mark us. It's going to send us an alert when the mark is at or above 12.50. So once it breaks 12.50 and goes above 12.50, we're going to be alerted. Let's say you want to create an alert if it falls below, it's at, what is it at now? $9 or something? Let's say we want an alert for it when it's at 8.50 or below. We can do mark is at or below 8.50. So we'll do two alerts for this one just for the example. So we do that, we create an alert there. So once it goes below that, it triggers. And let's say we make another alert here is at or above. We'll do that 12.51 that we just talked about. So now we have two alerts on Kronos. You know, if it goes down there, it'll alert us. If it pops up, it will alert us and then we can really execute our plans either by shorting it if it breaks below here, for an example, right? Or going long if it does break above 12.50. So that is how you can create an alert. And again, if you set it up on your phone, it will send you alerts to your phone if you have notifications on and that's very, very good. And let's say for example, you're actually using TD Ameritrade to trade and you can use think or swim in that case to actually execute your trades, which is pretty cool. I don't actually use TD Ameritrade, but let's say I did, you know, this is what you'd use. You know, you'd use buy market, sell market, whatever you want in terms of quantity. And of course, whatever the stock is on the left is what it's going to end up purchasing. I personally use think or swim for charting and I actually use a different platform for executing trades because honestly guys, the platform I use, the charting software it has, it's very subpar to what think or swim offers, which is why I'm using think or swim. But again, I'm executing trades on a different platform, but for those of you guys out there that are using think or swim, this is very important, excuse me, because you can do everything from right here. So this is the active trader. You can also do it from the top here. If you click trade, let's say you want to see the times and sales of the particular stock you're looking at. In this case, Kronos, you guys can see all the buy orders and the sell orders coming in. So at 12.26, about 10 seconds ago, someone placed a 27, he sold 27 shares at 9.04. You can see, let's look at some big ones here. Someone put a big buy order, 21,000 shares at $9.03 about two minutes ago on the dot. So that's interesting. You can see are there buy orders coming in, sell orders, a little mixture of both. That is very, very cool. You can also take a look at some other things such as level two. Level two is a bit more advanced, but you can see the bid, you can see the ask, you can see NASDAQ, you can see Newark Stock Exchange, you can see ARCA, you can see all of these down here on the left. You can see a bunch of live news about the stock that you are watching, which I personally like. If I'm looking to trade a stock, I like to see what's the news involving that stock. So you can see Kronos Group here, a bunch of the stock news involving this particular stock. Of course, if you go to other ones like GE, you can see news on GE, you can see news on Apple and so forth. So those are some brief tools. I'm sure you guys saw me in the beginning of the video, do this up here, which allows you to have multiple charts on the screen. This is also important in my opinion, if you do wanna watch multiple charts, let's say you have a massive computer, right? Me personally, I trade off of a laptop. All I have is a MacBook Pro, I think it's like 13 inches, but let's say you have a massive 30, 40 inch monitor, you can do something like this, which allows you to have different stocks in here. Let's say we want Boeing, let's say we want Google, and let's say we want Apple, right? Actually, no, Apple's already pulled up. Let's say we want, what's a stock stock? T, let's say we want AT&T, and of course you can end up putting your studies in based on whatever sets you have pre-made here. If you click here on the set, you can do use set, and then it will put all those preset indicators into these new windows you open. So this is just a pretty cool way to look at a bunch of different stocks at once. So overall, guys, that is the video. That's the basic really tutorial on how to use Thinkor Swim and how to get your feet wet with indicators, watch lists, alerts, how to scan for stocks, and how to use some of these side filters and side, not really filters, but more side tools that you are seeing here on the platform. So if you found valuing this video, if you did enjoy this video, feel free to go down below, hit that like button, consider subscribing and let me know in the comments, do you use Thinkor Swim? Do you like it so far? And just let me know your experience with it. I'd love to know. So I'll catch you all in the next video. I really do appreciate all of you watching, especially if you stuck till the end. Peace out.