Hey what's up guys, Josiah here with easycators.com and I wanted to do a real short video on how to increase the speed of your thinkorswim platform I know I've had trouble recently with the my Mac version of thinkorswim with a recent update they released it really seemed to get bogged down and slow and really unresponsive and so I been trying to solve that problem recently and I've seen lots of tricks in the past some of which didn't really seem to work for me but I wanted to go over all the different options that are available for you to to try things that can help speed up your system and get around issues that you're having so the first thing which is one of the easiest things you can do is just go over to the help screen and thinkorswim to the system page and click collect garbage this will clear out the memory and basically just free up some memory space on your system this this happens normal or on its own automatically during the day but you know and I haven't really seen this help a whole lot but this is one option that's available if you're and getting bogged down you can go over here and click collect garbage and that wolf potentially help in your situation the next thing this is mostly for those of you who are going to be like swing traders and longer-term investors or traders you can this is the opposite of what they normally tell you and the articles and so forth about thinkorswim you can actually turn down the quote speed so if we go into application settings and go to system we can change so we have options here for how fast we've received the quotes so real time would mean no delay you know fast means max delay one second and so forth so if you're a long-term trader you really don't need every second every tick you know that kind of thing and the closer you get to real time here the more resources in your system you're going to be eating up managing all those quotes coming in second by second so if you can turn this down and most people tell you to turn it up because they think that's going to make it look more responsive but actually it's taking up more system resources and so that's actually going to be making your system slower so what I would suggest for those of you that are not day traders and so forth or you know if you're a swing trader or longer term then you can turn this down to maybe moderate or fast something like that if you're really long term you can turn it down farther than that even and and actually I've found that you know a lot of trading is based on emotion and not having the stock you know jittering right in front of you every you know ever seeing every little tick you know making you oh oh is this you know is this position going to work or not you know that kind of thing sometimes just having the the quotes coming in at a slow gradual you know really steady pace and not really seeing every single little movement that it makes sometimes that can actually help in your trading so you know you might even just consider it for psychological purposes not just for speeding up your system so anyway there's a quick suggestion for longer-term traders and so you can just set this to whatever you think you can deal with you can play around with different settings hit apply and see how they work for you and go from there so that's number two so the next potential thing you can do is I'm going to close out of my system here and restart it and so you can go in here to the launch screen and we can adjust the minimum and maximum memory allotment we go into settings here we have a memory usage minimum and maximum settings so minor set kind of high depending on your system you know you depending on how much RAM you have in your system how much memory you might want to adjust these differently than me but the main one that that actually matters is this maximum memory that you're going to be allowing to thinkorswim and so just set that according to what you think would work best for your system based on how much RAM you have so and just keep in mind that you know like 6000 megabytes is the same thing as 6 gigabytes essentially so that's how that works so if you have you know 8 gigabytes of RAM then 6 gigabytes might be a good maximum or 4 gigabyte something like that so that's one option another couple of quick thoughts on just your general system so you know it may be that your system is actually just not capable of handling the latest versions of thinkorswim and so you might need to upgrade your system or something like that another thing you can do is actually conserve your systems resources by reducing the number of looks so I you know I have three monitors on my system so that's using up a lot of graphics processing power and so I can conserve that power by only using two screens or reducing the resolution of each screen so I have like a couple of 5k monitors so I can turn those to a lower resolution and that will use up less processing power in and from the graphics card so that's another option you can also make sure you're not running as many programs simultaneously and that kind of thing and that you have all the bells and whistles in your main you know your system whether it's Windows or Mac or whatever that you have all those extra bells and whistles that you don't need turned off so that you spare resources for thinkorswim so and actually I don't need to get back into the platform here the next thing that you can do is you can clear out your user GUI let me get into it here application so I'm going to go to thinkorswim in APC you're going to go to Program Files and thinkorswim and then you'll see this user GUI folder and so what you can do and before you do this what I would do is actually just copy your your whole TD a folder or thinkorswim folder make a duplicate of it as a backup all your you know your indicators and that kind of thing are usually going to be backed up by thinkorswim itself and stored with your username but some of the local items will be only in this folder so you want to create a backup of this and you know before you proceed to these next couple of options to be sure that you don't damage anything beyond repair so so these next two options are a little bit more technical a little bit more dangerous that you know you could mess something up if you don't know what you're doing so but anyway if you go to your you know Windows Program Files or your Mac Applications folder go to your thinkest one folder and find the user GUI folder you can actually just drag this to the trash recycle bin or on a Mac you can hit command delete and that will delete it and so then the next time you launch thinkorswim it will rebuild that folder automatically and the same so that just clears out a bunch of junk you know if you have a lot of extra data that's been downloaded or cached files and that kind of stuff it clears all that out and you'll notice that there's a little bit of a performance bump that you get by clearing all that stuff out of the system and actually this is the main thing that I found that actually helps my system run a little bit better so I would definitely suggest trying this after you create a backup of your thinkorswim folder try deleting that user GUI and see if that improves the system the power of the platform speed for you because it seemed to do that for me pretty well the next one I actually haven't had much success with but I think a lot of other people have and so I wanted to what you can do in that case in case this will be beneficial for any of you it wasn't for me really but what you can do is go into your thinkorswim BM auctions file which is also in that thinkorswim folder in your Program Files and you can open this up in a text editor and you're basically just going to copy and paste this text over top of what's already there and you're going to save it and overwrite the original and so this is supposed to optimize your system in certain ways you'll notice up here it has some settings for X M X and X and s these are actually your men and Max Ram settings to 2048 megabytes 1024 megabytes is the minimum so actually what what I have set is 60 144 and 256 so you can you can ignore those you can just leave them how they were but so these are just some preferences that you're setting in the actual kind of a configuration or options file for thinkorswim directly and I don't know a lot about this I know a lot of people have said they've experienced a performance boost by using these preferences so if that helps I'm going to include the text in the description of the video for you to copy and paste over just again be sure you make a backup of your folder before you do that because this is a little bit more you know tampering with the nitty-gritty details of the platform you don't want to do that without creating a backup of your system first so anyway I'll post this text for you to copy and paste in the video hopefully these ideas will be a benefit to someone out there and I know from me like I said the deleting the user GUI folder and letting it be rebuilt by the platform when I launched the next time that seemed to give me the biggest performance boost along with of course just I you know when I upgraded my internet to a hundred I think it's a hundred megabits that you know when I struck when I got fiber for the first time that definitely helped my system out a little bit as well so you know sometimes you know these little tricks that can help speed up your platform eventually you might need to just go ahead and upgrade your system in general or increase your internet speed that kind of thing but hopefully this will be of help to you and if so please consider hitting subscribe give us a thumbs up and give some feedback below in the comments section and be sure to check us out at easycators.com