Liquid Fusion's  Instablog

Think or Swim - Points You Need To Know

Features below ought to be highlighted on the TDA website and in the manual introduction of TOS:

Analyze Charts

Risk Profile - Option Position Probabilities

• Drag Chart to Pan
• Drag Prices to Change Scale

Trade - Active Trader

• Create Option Charts + RT LeveI II Quotes
• RT Heatmaping of LeveI II Quotes
• Order Tkts + Buy Sell Dashboard

Remember to watch the underlying!!! Options follow stock movements. Bells & whistles can and do become mezmerizing. Don't get hypnotized!!!

Trade - All

You ought to customize Trading Screen: Calls | Puts

• BidX - AskX - Last - High - Low - Vol - Open Interest - Strike

Right now you can do this only for one side of trading screen i.e. calls.
Puts columns are reverse order of call columns. It'd be great to have both sides of the screen have the same column sequence: Calls | Puts

Prophet Charts

• Scale charts to have distinctive / clean look with studies
• Put Prophet charts on 2nd monitor screen (undock)

Heat Map
Clean RealTime map of active stocks

Widget 360

Call / Put - option volume / open interest distribution bell curves

Discussion:

Discovered these features the hard way - by taking the software out for a test drive. TDA ought to save clients time by showing them these screenshots of what can be done.

Need to allow hiding of account # - useful when making screenshots with Google Picassa - otherwise need to Photoshop out account #.

Warning: Turn off TDA Alerts! Especially during trading hours. No need to be interrupted by messages trading classes are about to begin.

Review: - by independent option trader

TDA Think or Swim - A winner. Decent software; however they make it hard to find the diamonds in the rough. Once you find out how to put these nuggets of gold together it becomes a formidable trading tool: Charting option risk probabilities and volume distribution offer great insights into trading.

Important to remember - the vision of where the underlying stock is going is always key - even with all the bright lights and flashing charts. For this reason, I still prefer charts from TDA Strategy Desk for their look and feel plus ease of switching between different time frames.

Sometimes I mix it up - Strategy charts on monitor One, Option charts on monitor Two - and maybe an undocked option chart from Option Xpress.

Note: OptionXpress has great streaming option charts with T&S plus a good view of volume buying / selling of options. To be reviewed soon.

TDA Think or Swim Screenshots - resized to 1040 pixels wide

(click to enlarge)