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
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