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How to Chart Options on ThinkorSwim
8K views
Dec 17, 2022
In today's video we'll learn how to chart options on the ThinkorSwim desktop platform. Charting an option will allow you too see the historical price of the contract as well as use some of the advanced tools specifically for the contract. You'll be able to use the active trader to trade them more quickly, use level II data to see open orders, and time and sales information to see past trades.
View Video Transcript
0:00
Hey everyone, welcome back to the Thinkersome tutorial series
0:03
In today's video, we're going to go over how to view an options chart on the Thinkersome platform
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Now, I get this question all the time, but it's actually incredibly easy to do, so this should
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be a pretty short video. The very first thing I want to do before even viewing the option chart is actually add a second
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chart to this one. Now, to do that, all I have to do is come up here to the upper right hand corner where this
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little square is at. Once I click on it, I'm going to have a drop-down menu with a bunch of little squares
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and I simply want to click on the second square, because all I want to do is add a
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second chart to the right of this one. Now once I click on it, you're going to see a chart
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automatically open up on the right hand side. And looking at the very first chart, you can see I
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already have this one linked to red. So what I'm going to do is link this second chart to any other
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color other than red. In this case, I'll just do yellow. Now that I've got that set up, we can
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actually throw an option chart over here in the right. And I'll explain the reason I did this
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here in a minute, but what we'll do is go over to the trade page. And from here, we can see all
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of the options contracts available for Apple in this case. Now let's say I did want to chart the
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21 January options and specifically I wanted to look at a chart for the 160 calls So coming down here you can see the 160 calls right here are going for 1385 by 1420 The simplest way to chart this option is by right clicking on it
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From here, you're going to see a drop-down menu, and we're going to look at the very last item there, where it says send Apple 2
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From here on the right, you can see a whole bunch of colors listed, and we're actually going to send it to our second chart, which was marked in yellow
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So we'll go ahead and click on that. Now, as soon as I go to my charts page, we're going to see that 160 call reflect on the right-hand side
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So now I'm looking at Apple, the actual underlying stock on the left hand side
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and I'm looking at the 160 call option on the right hand side. And if I zoom in, this was the actual traded price for that option
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And down below, you can see the volume bars for that option now as well. Now, I think at this point, the reason is actually quite obvious why I did it this way
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It's so I can see the actual stock on the left, so I know the underlying stock price, as well as the option price
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Also, now if I were to change this, let's say I were to go to Microsoft in this case
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We'll type an MSFT. And let's say I was charting out the same expiration, 21 January
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and we wanted to do the let say I don know 305 calls We just go ahead and right click on that We gonna come down to Send 2 and go to Yellow Now when we go back to the chart you going to see I got Microsoft on the left and the 305 calls on the right
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If I were to get rid of this, let's say I went back to a single chart. And let's say I just wanted to put an option on this chart
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We're going to put those same 305 calls here. So we're going to come down here down below, right click on the 305 calls, and say Send 2 red in this case
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It's now annoying because my trade page, which is also marked to red
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also changes to the 305 calls. Now when I go to the charts page, I'm looking at the 305s
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but if I wanted to look at, let's say, the $300 calls, now I'm going to have to go back here and type in Microsoft again
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and then find the $300 calls. It's a whole lot easier just to set up your chart with two individual charts
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so then you'll have the stock price on the left and the option price on the right. At least that's how I would personally do it
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Now, another thing that's cool here is if we threw an option over there, let's go ahead and link this to yellow again
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and we'll go ahead and right click on it. on one of these guys and send to yellow once again, all of the tools on the right hand side
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where we see trade time and sales active trader these now all apply to this particular contract So if I was to pull up let say Level 2 data These are now all of the open buy and sell orders for this particular contract for the
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315 calls. If we look on the left-hand side, these are all the open buy orders for this contract
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If we look at the right-hand side, the ass side, these are all of these sell orders for the 315 calls
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If we were to get rid of Level 2 and come up here to Active Trader, this active trader ladder
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is now tied to the Microsoft 315 calls. If I were to hit Buy Market, I'm buying. I'm buying
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buying the 315 call. If I hit sell market, I'm selling the 315 call. If I were to get rid of that
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and go to time and sales, this is now the time and sales information for this 315 call. So I think
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you get the point when you open up the chart for the option. You don't just get a chart of options
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You get all of these tools on the right hand side as well. Now, like I said, this was a very quick
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video, but that does cover pretty much everything you're going to need to know to view an option chart
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on Think or Swim. If I miss anything or you guys have any additional questions at all
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please let me know down below in the comments. I am starting to run out of ideas
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for tutorial videos about Think or Swim, so please let me know if you do have any video topics or suggestions for me
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But we will go ahead and wrap it up here. I hope you guys off an amazing rest of your week
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and I'll see you all in the next video
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