Transcript for:
Schwab Coaching: Getting Started with Thinker Swim

hello everyone and welcome to Schwab coaching my name is Cameron May and this is getting started with thinker swim and today we're going we're going to be reviewing 10 cool tools that you may not even know we on thinker swim I think there's going to be something here for just about everybody for investors for Traders for stocks for options so keep your eyes out and as we go through these what I'd like you to do is see how many of these are brand new to you and how many you have actually been familiar with before give take a little running tally how many have you seen before I'll ask you the end but it should be just about something for everybody before we get into all of that though let me first of all say hello to everyone that's chatting in through uh YouTube great to see all those familiar names again hello there Paul and John Eva Frank and everybody else thanks for joining us week after week I really do appreciate your ongoing attendance and your contributions to these discussions if you're here for the very first time I want to welcome you as well and if you're watching on the YouTube archive after the fact enjoy the presentation but be aware that you're invited to join us in a live discussion this one kicks off promptly 3:00 Eastern Standard Time on Mondays and typically runs about 25 minutes that's about what you want to budget this one may go a little bit longer but you're certainly welcome to join us but let's get right into it as we do one thing uh I do want to point out is I'm joined here in the live stream by my very good friend Ken Rose he's going to be answering any questions in the chat that I can't get to and if you do us both this favor and yourself a favor follow us on X our our handles there at kenrose CS is Cameron maycs and that's a great resource that uh that's available whether you're watching a live stream or you have to watch The Archives you can pop over to X and if you reply to one of my posts that's I try to reply right back to you it's a great resource there but let's get right into it very first thing that we need to bear in mind here is that there is a risk associated with investing just remember the information here is for General informational purposes only should not be considered an individualized recommendation or endorsement of any particular security chart pattern or investment strategy options carry a high level of risk and are not suitable for all investors investing involves risks including the loss of principle and any investment decision you make in your self-directed account is solely your responsibility now I am going to be using the Thinker swim platform so we're going to be using the software version of thinker swim looks a little bit different than if you're on the you know um the web-based version of thinker swim so to download the software just remember you can do that from the trade area on your Schwab online account or you can go to thinkers swim.com but let's set the agenda for today's discussion pretty simple agenda I thought since we've been going in over the course of the last eight weeks we've had very structured lessons just getting acquainted with thinker swim today I wanted to be a little bit more freewheeling and just explore maybe some of what I might consider to be the hidden gems of thinker swim so we're going to be going through 10 cool tools that you probably didn't know were actually on thinker swim we're going to do some for as I mentioned for Traders some for investors for stocks and options and everything so let's get right to the platform and we're going to start off with one that I think could have appeal to just about everybody and we're going to go kind of easy at first and then kind of dial it up get a little bit more let's throw this in air quotes obscure for for lack of a better word okay so I would suspect they're going to be some of you are familiar with the first couple of functions that I demonstrate here but I think that they're so widely applicable I want to make sure that everybody's aware that it's available on thinker swim so one thing that's really nice about thinker swim is the flexibility how it can be customized and uh all throughout thinker swim you can organize things into columns and when we learn how to customize those columns it's easy to start getting very crowded with the columns okay uh so for example let's say I'm using my left uh display field over here and it's kind of crowding in on the right display area and my columns here we're just on the monitor tab you can see I have several example columns here one of which is are the sectors for the different stocks in our example portfolio and they're kind of a little bit squished so how do we un squish a column regardless of where we are on thinker swim well if we go right up to the column heading you'll know that there are small margin div uh divisors right here or divisions right down between each column as I hover over those you notice I get double-headed arrows which means that we can move that that margin of the column to the right or to the left widen it or narrow it so for example if I wanted to see the sectors more fully I could come to the right side of that column and just drag it out to the right it's just a click and a drag now necessarily that's going to compress some other columns so if they start to get squished now I have a mystery column over here I can widen that if needed just a click and a drag and we can just quickly reposition our columns until until we're satisfied with how they're displayed that's a nice little feature not everybody knows about it on our on our uh Cool Tools that's number one so do a little mental check did you already know know about that one or not if you were over here in your watch list and you had customized columns and one of them was getting a little bit compressed did you know that you could expand that column well now you do if you didn't know so on to tool tool number two and that is let's go to our charts for this example I'm going to pop over here to the charts Tab and let's say that we're navigating through a watch list so what I here have here for an example is a watch list of the component companies of the S&P 500 this is a public watch list that's compiled and published by thinker swim you don't need to to construct it it's already there you would just open up watch list here in your left column and then click on the column heading and go to the public watch list in alphabetical order to the S&P 500 that's that's how I launched this okay but let's say I wanted to quickly work down through maybe the largest companies in the S&P 500 so maybe I've oriented the market capitalization column so that as we click on that you can see we've gone from largest to smallest so here's Apple yeah Microsoft and Apple are kind of currently duking it out for the largest company in the world right now they're kind of switching back and forth from week to week it's interesting little tug-of-war happening there but let's say I wanted to load up a chart of Apple so I could look at it a one year or three week or whatever or a three threeyear weekly whatever I could type in the symbol here and then if I wanted to look at Microsoft I could type in the symbol for Microsoft and hit enter working my way down through this list or you can actually link functions within thinker swim you can link functions you can link pages so you don't have to keep continually reenter symbols so to do this here's another uh key within thinker swim let's widen click on the little margin between the left column and and the right display area let's widen that up and what you'll see probably first time you use thinker swim is this link this chain link right here if you don't see it it's because there's not enough space for it so make sure that you've made enough space for it so you can see that little chain link then if I click on that it gives me a menu of choices going in numerical order from 1 to nine and then there's a range of colors associated with those don't worry too much about number and color here just know that they're different okay what we want to do here is link let's link our watch list to notice there's another chain link right over here let's link that to our charts so as long as I choose the same number or the same color whether you're numbers oriented or color oriented great let's choose number one red here and I'm going to choose number one red over here and then notice what it did Apple was highlighted in my watch list and since those are linked it automatically populated apple on my on my chart over here and if I were to then move that highlight to Microsoft that was just with a click of my mouse it automatically loads up a chart of Microsoft and I can even just use the up and down arrows on my keyboard see I hit the down arrow moving along uh through that watch list I'm not having to enter all those symbols it just automatically feeds that symbol into the chart because they're linked and we can link to other areas of thinker swim so for example let's say um my habit is to look at a chart and then pop over to place a trade if we're intrigued by a stock okay so then we go to the trade Tab and look at that it's the wrong symbol how do you think we might recruit that symbol from the chart well we just need to link here so I'm going to change my link to red and now Nvidia which was already on the chart it was already in our watch list is now also populated in the trade tab so keep an eye out everywhere there's a link on on thinker swim that means that we can link to other functions within thinker swm now we we don't have to use the same link maybe we want the trade tab linked with the charts tab and so we use one color maybe we want our watch list linked to the analyze tab so we use another color okay all right jack you're saying this is more than getting started I've never used thinker swim yeah yeah Jack I I had that fear as I was laying out this discussion I still think this is GNA going to be useful even if you're brand new to thinker swim but what we just completed is a series of eight structured lessons and what you can do and I've suggest this for everybody make sure that you have subscribed to our Trader talks Channel on YouTube and all of those lessons are actually archived there in our playlists on YouTube and you can just go through our eight lessons and it literally starts with lesson one introduction to thinker swim and the so the last eight weeks Jack I've been entirely focused on making sure that everybody could follow along step by step it was just this week I decided let's mix it up a little bit different and let's just show some things that I still think are basic function of thinker swim that but that might also you know pass the um the radar of some users of the platform okay yeah but I do want you to know there's that great series of lessons lessons one through eight you'll see them labeled lesson one of eight lesson two of eight lesson three of eight just go to the playlist for the channel on thinkers oh pardon on YouTube great all right so there's two Cool Tools and I would suspect there's going to be some here You Know Jack you're not going to be alone these are going to be brand new to a lot of people there are going to be others that are going to be like Cameron check already knew about linking check already knew about column um adjusting well um this next one I would suspect most of you are not going to know for some of you it might be nice you know you ever watch uh you know your favorite News Channel and it has a little streaming ticker and you wonder why do they have those tickers there why would I care about those wouldn't be nice if they were streaming the tickers that I was interested in and just constantly updating those that's available on thinker swim so you can find that if you go right up here to the homepage and bear with me for just a moment I need to Pi take a peek behind the screens yep there we go but I'm going to click on that home screen and you'll notice down here on the bottom is a streaming ticker it's like a tick or tape of uh of symbols that are actually of interest to this port folio because I've linked it to my current account so there's a menu right over here where we can choose which tickers we want to be showing could be tickers from all sorts of watch lists or we just choose our current account positions okay so this is giving me an update on how those stocks are doing and I don't always have to Deb you love that streaming ticker that's a Nifty little feature huh here's another cool thing watch what I'm gonna do now I'm gonna come here to The Thinker swim and I'm going to pull the bottom of the screen up so it's just a click and a drag so you're seeing the bottom of my slide deck back here and I'm going to detach this ticker see that little window over to the right just detach that from the normal thinker swim platform and I'm going to sort of reposition it down here so guess what's going to happen now now I can use the rest of the platform and that ticker stays right down there at the bottom is that cool tool number three all right so um and by the way if you're using any links Jack since you're new to the platform thank you uh Ken for adding those links but there are links that have to be imported into the Thinker swim platform so if you don't know that yet don't worry about it Jack for those that actually use those those sorts of links um I'm not going to get into those are are added to the platform today but thanks Ken for keeping those posted but yeah Jack they don't work like a normal URL while you can click them you actually have to import them into the Thinker swim platform okay all right so nice Okay I think we've just moved from some of you were two for two so far now you're okay we're two that I knew one that I didn't all three of those I think these uh these techniques can have application to just about anybody on thinker swim whether we're an investor or a Trader whether we're doing stocks or options nice little features there um next up I think it's also widely applicable whether trading or investing whether stocks or options and it's a charting function so let's go to our charts and uh you know I think and by the way we're not going to be using this left column for just a moment so we can hide that and there's a little right here on the charts I'm going to click on the little hide um the little toggle switch that little arrow is just going to push that off to left we go back and bring that back if we wanted click on it and move it back to the right anyway but um thinker swim has some fabulous charting capabilities and uh I do get the question from time to time Cameron what if I'm keeping an eye on several uh stocks at once maybe I want to have them all displayed on my screen all at once a matter of fact I answered a comment on YouTube just today where somebody asked that there are a couple of ways that we can do that one way is to detach the chart so we could come up here to the little menu icon looks like a DOT Three Dots and three dashes and select detach and that creates a chart in its own separate window and we could move that off maybe to a side screen you can see that this is now its own independently maneuverable chart but another thing I think that wasn't one of my Cool Tools one of the Cool Tools that I wanted to get you acquainted with that some of you are familiar with but I want to make sure that the navigation is as smooth as possible is the grid feature right up here notice there's just a big empty box there that's because it's just showing us that right now we're using one chart if we click on that we can check we can uh change to two charts or four charts or six charts or nine charts just by hovering over this layout and choosing what display we want okay so how about I go for yeah let's go for four today so I'm going to click on the fourth chart right there and you'll notice this has now brought up a grid of four charts but the first one is the only one that's occupied that's because we loaded up Nvidia now we can use this second grid cell we call these individually cells to retrieve other charts let's put Ford in this window let's put GE in this window and let's maybe put and these are just these are just top of the Mind completely example charts so we can load up other charts here and you'll notice now these are different yeah Eva says the grid featur is too cool for school we're talking about cool cool functions on thinker swim right but notice that they are different they I this is one style of chart and this is another style of chart and I'm using the word sty very deliberately okay let me show just a quick navigational tip for this grid chart tool I'm going to first of all zoom in on just this one while maintaining a layout of four so here's what I'm talking about up in the upper right of any of these is another menu if I click on that menu icon I can choose to maximize this cell remember that we call them cells let's maximize that cell and we're looking at that and then if I want to advance to the other charts I can just use these arrows to go forward to the other charts that I've loaded and if I want to go back to all four I just click on the back arrow might have done that one a little bit quickly let's maximize this again and there's the back button to take us back to seeing all four at the same time but what I wanted to show you within this and this was one of those cool features we'll call this um the grid chart plus this next feature I'm going to call that cool tool number four and that is we can actually automatically load up the same style for each of these different grid charts by selecting style so we're going to go to style and let's say we want this style of chart this maybe it's a fairly basic candle chart it also has expiration dates for options maybe maybe this uh this example Trader is an options Trader let's go to style and I'm going to save this style okay I mean we're just going to call it basic with expirations it doesn't matter what you call it here just something that's meaningful to the trader or to that investor and let's just save that now if I go to my other charts I can just go to style and I can load that style that I just saved look at that advance to the next one load that style Advance the next one load that style and so if we're looking at them individually we're looking at the same style or if we're looking them uh in the aggregate they all have the same style so you don't need to go in you know I'll admit something when I first started using thinker swim I would set up the grid and I think oh this is amazing and I'd set this one up with the way that I preferred to have it set up and then I'd come over here and I'd go through all the setup process to set that one up change it to the time frame that I that I preferred candle versus line all the different little style settings and then I realized h i could just load the save style so yep with apologies I know for Jack and for others who are new this is a little bit deeper in the weeds some of these are going to be oneclick two click things this one why not let's indulge ourselves a little bit and go a little bit deeper into the platform that's cool tool number four okay um let me you know what we have we all had a good enough look at the ticker down here is cool as it is I'm just going to delete it show you how you can get rid of it you just click on the X and it's gone and then you can just drag your your platform layout back out full screen and let's go back to just that one chart view all right number five we're shifting now we've just given a little bit of attention to features that could be useful to everybody could some that could be more useful maybe a grid possibly more useful to a Trader versus a longer term investor maybe they don't need to move through the charts qu quite that rapidly but I'm going to shift gears and talk to the traders in the pardon me the investors in the audience for just a moment and I'm going to go to the trade Tab and I want I want you to give me some feedback here how many of you never saw this maybe you've been using the Thinker swi platform for a while and didn't realize this was there when you go to the trade Tab and you load up a symbol here um it displays some information about that stock right down there you don't have to do anything special go to trade tab type in your symbol and automatically you can see the last price it traded for the net change the bid and the ask the volume the Open high low that stuff well for our investors I get the question all the time Cameron where can I see the dividend information what's a quick way to find dividend this looks like it's all oriented toward trading trading stocks trading options well actually if you look right here you'll notice there's a little carrot or a little arrow pointing to the right and on thinker swim when there's an arrow it means you can click it to point down or click it again to uh point to the right I'm going to click on that arrow and there's a hidden line of additional data that's potentially more appealing to the investors in the audience look at this we can see a dividend yield if the stock pays a dividend yield how about I I'm going to switch my chart here how about we bring up a stock like XOM maybe something that pays uh not XOM let's go to uh Altria Group Mo okay again this is not a sales pitch for any of these stocks it's just as an example but here's has a dividend yield of 9.68% I can see the PE Ratio I can see the actual dividend quarterly in this case you can see that it's paid quarterly the dividend frequency I can see the X dividend date so if we want to extrapolate out three months from that we might be able to guesstimate where the next uh what the next X dividend date might fall we can see the 52e high and low we can see the number of shares and the beta how volatile is is this stock relative to the S&P 500 if you're not familiar with beta it really is just an expression of historical volatility as benchmarked against the S&P 500 if if you see a beta score of one it means the stock moves about with the S&P if it's a one point something 1.2 1.3 that means that that stock tends to move about 20 or 30% faster than the S&P but generally in the same direction um if you see a a number like this 7 that might mean that this is about 30% less volatile than the S&P all right so all of that could be interesting but this is cool tool number five I'm just going to call it that that the trade tab hidden line that I think it's one that can just escape the attention of uh a lot of us because we don't know to click on that little button so I just wanted to show that to you quick way to get dividend yield PE ratio and and beta okay now on the same um along the same lines of dividend investing let's stick with investing for just a moment I want to talk about charts maybe I'll just stick with the Altria Group as well let's go to a chart of Altria Group it is linked to our trade tab so notice the platform already knows this is what we're looking at look at that chart of Al how does that look for a technical investor or a Trader might not look too appealing let's switch this even come up here to the top change our time frame to you know what I'm even go to a fiveyear chart let's bring up a a custom time frame five years weekly like okay if we look back five years ago and we look at uh where this stock was let's look at end of the week from five years ago to where we are right now not a great Trend right well this is a stock that historically has paid a comparatively High dividend and what what I didn't know when I first got into investing and it's been more than two decades now but you know everybody start somewhere I didn't know that stock prices are adjusted downward every time a dividend is paid that a matter of fact it didn't even make sense to me why in the world does the stock price need to be adjusted down just because the divet is paid well a dividend literally means the company and this is the way that I think about it's not actually how it works but the way that I think about it just imagine a company writing a million two million three million checks again it's not how it works but it helps to think about it this way they're spending a lot of money to send money out to their shareholders a lot of money you know alria group is sort of a more exaggerated version of this of this concept and if they're doing that every quarter they're literally riding off a big asset from their ledgers every quarter and that also brings down the value of that company and if one subscribes to the idea that the price per share is basically the aggregate valuation according you know the the aggregate wisdom of all investors in a company like Altria Group uh it's the current valuation of a stock with all assets and liabilities and then you take some of those assets off the books get what happens to that uh that valuation yeah it drops but yes share price is adjusted downward when a dividend is paid so if lots of Dividends are paid over a long period of time what what influence can that have on this the share price especially if markets let's just say Market uh demand isn't offsetting all those dividends well it can it can give the impression that a stock is underperforming so we might look at a chart from a five-year perspective on a company like alria group and say this looks just terrible well um the standard practice on most charts is to just leave those dividends out of the equation and for some investors they they're like well that doesn't actually reflect the total performance of the stock because price appreci appreciation or depr depre depreciation is one thing but what if we were to put all the dividends back into the equation that we were paid over the course of the last five years could that change the Outlook yep by the way the links remember um oh all that can can deal with that anyway let's change that outlook on Altria Group right up here in our chart settings I'm going to click on this gear icon on our charts and I'm going to go to equities and notice here there's a field that says adjust for dividends and Right Now the default is to just adjust the chart for special dividends in other words what this means is to kind of move the price back to where it was before um a dividend was paid a special dividend is just when a company announces maybe it's just a really big outsized dividend and it has a huge impact on the charts and maybe to adjust for that a charting service will sort of make you know fix or repair that uh that that price trend as though the dividend were never paid well if we click on this I'm going to choose all so what I'm doing here is showing how price has done if all those dividends hadn't been subtracted from it in the first place what do you envision is going to be happening with the chart of of Altria Group which pays this very large dividend I know even spit it out I got it out eventually yeah let's click apply and click okay and now my line no longer applies I'm going to right click on that remove that drawing because now if we look back at you know that that uh first week from five years ago and look at what price plus dividends has delivered to our hypothetical investor it's a very different scenario so once again there is um we're going to call that uh cool tool number six how many of you knew that cool tool was there once you're on charts and once you know how to do it you just pop up here you can change this and this really would have most application for a dividend investor go to equities and adjust for dividends I'm going to set that back to special because that's sort of the standard but for particularly for dividend investors trying to look at uh maybe what they might consider to be a trer picture of how a stock is performing plus dividends that's how that can be done so I'm going to click apply again click okay let's get rid of this old drawing right click on it and delete it maybe even switch this back to a one-year chart all right so that's a couple of cool tools for investors so far that hidden line on the trade tab the the uh changing of the dividend feature one more let's do a couple more all right let's talk about sector analysis for just a moment for some invest they like to keep their eyes on which sectors are doing well and which are doing poor uh the S&P 500 is made up of of approximately 500 companies actually varies a little bit above and below 500 but each of those companies are assigned to 11 basic categories based on what they do for a living you know you have some technology stocks so they're lumped under technology have some real estate stocks they're lumped under real estate utilities and so on and for some investors they like to follow the es and flows among those different sectors now within thinker swim right here on the charts thinker swim has actually compiled a list of those sectors and you can find that right over here in the left column I'm going to click on that little column toggle where we've hidden the column right now I've selected the S&P 500 which is showing me the 500 companies that make up the S&P 500 now let's look up the sectors that make up the S&P 500 so I'm going to click on that column heading and I'm going to go down to in alphabetical order the public watch list and I'm going to choose sector indices okay and this is going to show us the 11 sectors Now by default these are it's just showing us the symbols and symbols can sometimes not apparently relate to a stock come on I mean if you if you think about the the company Salesforce it symbol is CRM how many companies are they out there where this where the symbol Altria Group the symbol is Mo okay yeah the symbols here may not give one great insight into what the sector is so to see the sectors we can just click on the symbol and then if we hide this left column we can see which sector that is this is the energy sector and we can see what's been going on with energy recently as a group that sector's been a little bit under the weather okay now another thing that we might do since we may not want to have to toggle back and forth come over here to see what the sector is then go back over click on the next sector we can customize our columns and one column that I might suggest if we want to see those sectors as we customize this we're going to click on the little gear icon I'm going to choose customize remember the word description what is the description of this sector okay so I'm going to choose description I'm going to add that as a column and then click okay now what that's done done is we already had market cap we already had last what what are these three dots there's our crowded little description we need some space so we can click and drag there's that description if we need more space we can widen it out here energy materials Industrials consumer discretionary and so on and we can also we could move this uh this column heading over there but one cool tool that I wanted everyone to be aware of that we're that we may not have been a been aware of is that uh to do a quick technical view of the of the component um sectors that make up the S&P 500 you just load them up and if you want to load up a description and then quickly click through those and maybe see which sectors are doing poorly so here's energy struggling what about Industrials this one's apparently accelerating and significantly ahead of energy over the last several months right okay that's cool tool number seven how are we doing out of the seven how many were were familiar to you how many are this a first time view I'll say for some of you anytime there's an introduction to a new tool if you haven't ever used it before it might take a little bit of repetition so make a couple of notes and then go back after the T after day's webcast is over and do this in your paper money account practice the navigation to these tools and practice the navigation of these tools um another thing that's uh that's reassuring is if you're not catching it all during the live stream this pressure is really only on those that are watching the live stream you don't have to remember it all just as I'm saying it just bear in mind that these webcasts are archived posted to our playlist on YouTube and then you just go watch them at your own pace hit the pause button if you need to to digest what we've talked about okay three more let's uh let's do one more one more for the investors in the audience because I think thinker swim users can have the impression sometimes and I think U mistakenly that this platform is only for Traders nope there are lots of fabulous tools here for investors as well those that have that longer term Outlook and I think a lot of us might describe ourselves as having some of our portfolio allocated for trading maybe a lot more of it allocated for investing it's going to be a personal preference from one investor and Trader to the next but uh what if we wanted to take a look behind the scenes charting is great it can be you know it carries its own potential and its own uh its own um shortcomings but for some they prefer to look at the company behind the stock so they want to look at what we call the fundamentals of a company and there's actually a dedicated page to the fundamentals of publicly traded companies and you can find that on the analyze tab on thinker swim as we hover over that you're going to see one one of the choices in the drop- down menu is fundamentals and let me throw out a question here I know that uh even among our investors who are are familiar with the fundamentals page um you're going to be familiar with with some of the tools that are available there but let me let me say where where could we go if we wanted to see a breakdown of a big company what are its primary sources of revenue how does it make its money that seems to be a potentially important question for fundamental investor if I go to fundamentals how about we switch gears here let's look at Disney okay so I type in Disney lots of fundamental data here um as I scroll down through I'll leave I'll leave you to read through this on your own just know that we we found this by analyze and fundamentals but the cool tool number eight that I wanted to talk about today is down here at the bottom now this is a tool that's provided by this is a third- party provider um it's completely separate and unaffiliated called tfus but this Trace tool does give us a breakdown of where a company's primary revenue is derived and if you look at Disney in this example these are the divisions of Disney and it's shown as a percentage of market capitalization but uh where's the where's the primary what are the primary drivers of Revenue media and entertainment parks and experiences okay if I click on that and we just call these individually blocks if I click on each block it'll give me a more um more detailed breakdown networks content Sales Direct to Consumer what's that sound like streaming right if I click down here us Parks consumer products International Parks get a breakdown in pretty specific percentages that's the trace tool that's cool tool number that's cool tool number eight there's lots more here on this tool for those uh fundamentally or investing oriented uh viewers of the channel so hope that I've shown you some things that are potentially valuable to you but let's wrap it up with two two tools that are really more oriented toward the options Trader okay I do get the question from time to time Cameron um how do is there a chart of options on thinker swim how do I bring up a chart of how of how an options is done an option has done over the course of its lifespan yes there actually is but you have to know essentially the symbol for an option now we don't call it an option symbol anymore it's referred to as an option code so let me show you where to go find the option code and load up a chart very quickly so let's go to the trade tab let's switch up our symbol here again and let's use apple okay it's just the first symbol that sprung to mind so we'll use that as our example down below is our familiar option chain and as I open up this option chain it consists of a series of columns again and these columns as with so many columns in our finger swim layout are customizable so let's go to the current layout which is showing Delta Theta and Vega this is our current layout and I'm going to customize this layout and guess what's one of the columns that's available option code there it is so we're going to choose option code let's add that as one of our current set of columns and click okay and there is that symbol now don't try to memorize the symbol okay we could get into the formatting of a symbol but what I did want to show you number one is yes you can retrieve symbols and have them displayed here on your on in your options chain columns if you like but also if we right click on anyone one of those I wonder I don't know I I don't have any idea how is this apple 16th of February 195 call option done since its Inception well I can rightclick on that and look for more information on this symbol let's throw that onto thinker swim charts so there's our now familiar grid and as I choose that oh hold on a second did I choose more information on Apple meant to do it on yeah more information not on Apple but on the uh on the symbol on the uh option there we go there we go oh this must be what why does this chart look like this well this must be the very first day this this uh symbol was introduced that's interesting you can tell I didn't I didn't uh premeditate this symbol yeah I see just the one that that one candle tells me it's only been available for one day okay so we might want to go back here load up Apple again and choose maybe a different expiration okay let's go to maybe the 15th of March Let's uh choose a different strike price right click more info thinker swim charts did I do that right anyway you get the point but that's the quick way to load up your your symbol to a chart that's cool tool number nine we have time cool tool number 10 this is for those those options traders who know that the outcome of an option if we allow it to go to exporation is determined largely on so many strategies with where a stock price falls on a certain date it can be really important to understand the probabilities well if I need for my let's say my vertical spread I need the stock price to be above a certain level on a certain date what are the odds of that happening for my iron Condor I need the stock price to be between certain levels on a certain date what are the odds of that happening well what we're discussing here are probabilities okay and there is a a function on thicker swim if we go to the analyze tab called the probability analysis tool now I just threw out some very vague hypotheticals those options traders in the audience know what I'm talking about the performance of an option is largely determined by the intersection of price and time right uh certain price levels at a future date and this probability analysis tool is slick and quick at determining those probabilities so what we need to do go to the analyze tab choose probability analysis and all we have to do is type in our symbol so um let's switch our symbol again okay let's let's maybe say that one is trading Microsoft so we type in Microsoft and we get we get here a parabola known as the probability cone but really it's just an intersection of prices so these are potential prices in the future for Microsoft $ 350 $400 $450 intersected with number of days into the future 10 days into the future 20 days into the future 30 days or you'll also see that there are specific dates here these are expirations for the options on Microsoft so if I'm looking at let's say I have an option that's expiring on the 16th of February and I want to know what the probability is that the stock is going to be above oh let's say $350 all I have to do is point my cursor at the grid go to the 16th of February so I've chosen my intersection of time and intersect that with the price level that I'm interested in 350 so you'll notice as I move my cursor around there are crosshairs that are following me let me show you over here there will be a little bit more clear okay but if I put that back on my selected expiration settle it in on the price what I can see is above below my horizontal line right next to my crosshairs are two numbers and those are probabilities of price being above my selected price level um on my selected date or below so I could say oh there's about a 95% chance that Microsoft is going to be above $350 on the 16th of February there's about a 5% chance or and a half 5% chance that it'll be below that level on that date in the future so just by moving my cursor around on this chart and yes there are other functions here that I'm not going to get into but I didn't this isn't every tool on thinker swim these are 10 cool tools that you might not have known were on thinker swim there's our probability analysis chart all right that's cool tool number 10 guys we've accomplished what I set out to do today hope you've enjoyed this discussion I did know this was going to be going certainly deeper than we have over the last eight weeks as we built through those lessons just to introduce us get us familiar with the navigation of thinker swim so if you're new to thinker swim make sure that you have subscribed to our YouTube channel and you're going to the playlist going through lesson one of eight lesson two of eight lesson three of eight to really get acquainted with with the Thinker SL platform but uh tell me of the 10 how many of these tools were actually familiar to you and that'll also tell you how many of these tools are new that there is I think a good description of the value ad of this presentation I was looking forward to discussing this I hope you enjoyed it as much as I enjoyed uh preparing it um time for me to let you go but as you go just remember couple of things if you're not following Ken or me on Twitter you're missing out on a great resource uh my handle there Cameron May CS Ken is kenrose CS and if you reply to one of my posts I try to reply right back to you it allows for interaction uh it's only otherwise available here in a live stream so it's turns a rare opportunity into an everyday opportunity the other thing is if you're enjoying our webcast make sure that you subscribe to our Trader talks Schwab coaching webcast Channel on YouTube you can find my lessons and and and the rest of our archives right here on our playlist so make sure that you subscribed there everybody thanks for giving your time today I'm going to set you loose I'll look for you again next Monday 3:00 Eastern Standard Time is when we kick things off for this webcast I have other webcasts throughout the week I'll also look for you um on X but uh until the moment arrives when I see you again I want to wish you the very best of luck happy Trading byebye