3 MUST ENABLE ThinkorSwim Settings for Day Trading 💥 DAY 7 | Small Account Challenge transcript

in today's episode I'm going to walk you through the three settings you must enable on The Thinker swim platform if you're going to use it for active trading you know what these three settings are going to do they're going to make you a faster Trader a faster Trader is typically a more accurate Trader a more accurate Trader is a more profitable Trader so these settings are super important now right now I am in the middle of a small account challenge where I'm using the Thinker swim platform and a cash only account and I have a goal of growing it to 20 $5,000 as quickly as possible today is day 7 and the account is crossing over $117,000 and I wouldn't have been able to grow it this quickly if I hadn't enabled these settings so let's go ahead and jump onto the screen share and I'm going to start walking you through it now you can see and we're going to do a summary of uh today's trades I'm going to recap them uh at the end of this episode for those you guys who have been tuning in through this challenge so you can see the stock that's uh right here on my screen this stock is currently up right now 75% on the day this is a stock that has breaking news today it started squeezing up and it's soon as it started moving I knew that I wanted to trade it now I traded it both in my thinker swim small account right here for $432 71 of profit and I also traded it in my main account which has a balance of about $150,000 and I made 10 grand so it's a Green Day in both accounts but I I don't think I'd have this profit if I hadn't changed these settings so let me walk you through what these settings are all right so we're going to go ahead and start at the top now I'm using thinker swim and the way I use it I go into the trade Tab and I go to active Trader and I've set out my layout exactly like this where it sits over in the side kind of in the corner of my screen then I've got my uh charting platform here which is charting and scanning this is powered by day trade Dash which is the software that I've developed with my own development team and then I have my uh other trading account which you can see right up here this is the p&l window but the actual uh trading window is down uh just below right here now the first setting that we have to enable is under the setup widget so we go to the top right corner of the Thinker swim platform right here and you click that setup widget and then I go under General and down to active Trader and the first thing that I'm going to do is I'm going to change the active Trader order submission rate and I'm going to set it to zero this is important because what it allows is for me to doubleclick on the active Trader window and the active Trader buttons and for double clicks to send two orders some people will double click things and they don't want to send two orders so they already have it set up so your uh submission rate is throttled so if you do doubleclick it's not going to send multiple orders but for me I actually have times where I want to doubleclick and I want two orders to send and the reason that I'm double click is because it's faster to doubleclick the buy Market or the Buy Ask button than to come in here and change the number of shares from 500 to 1500 or 2500 either by clicking or by typing so sometimes it's just faster to click twice and so for that reason I want to change the active order submission rate to zero now I have the latter active Trader uh price ladder reset every 3 seconds which is the shortest period that you can have I think that's great and I have Auto send on active Trader with down click that's important and I have reset um active Trader order template after sending unchecked because I don't want it to reset my template now this is a template right here and I set this up specifically for the stock I'm trading including the number of shares so I don't want it to reset to the default every time I take a trade because then I have to go back in and change it to how I want for that particular stock so these are settings that are all inside this active Trader window and these are all really important they allow me to trade faster and they allow me to not have to switch around my order template once I've already got it set up now after that we go down to system we want to make sure uh for this setting our quote speed is set at Real Time with no delay this goes without saying but a lot of people don't have this set up at real time they'll have it set up at fast or moderate which Maybe their your computer will run faster like that but if you're actively trading you want to make sure you have real time quotes this is super important all right so real time quotes that's the second setting that you've got to make sure you enable then we're going to go to um oh we got one more here we're going to do we're going to go to Startup no sorry we're going to go to look and feel um nope it's under display all right so we're going to go to display right here and I'm going to change this uh right here show message and I'm going to change this from 10 seconds to do not show I don't want messages to display because what I found is that when messages display a lot of times the message will hover like right here and it's right over my buy and sell buttons so all of a sudden I can't click until the message clears and the message doesn't let me X out of it I have to wait for it to manually clear after 10 seconds or whatever it is so I set this to do not show messages I don't want to see the messages now I take it a step further and I go under the under the notifications window and I say don't notify me with order fills or thinker swim announcements I just turn all of those notifications off so under General we've got the settings of active Trader we've got the settings of system and we've got the settings on display all right those are the three settings so far that are probably most important there's a couple more that I'm going to share with you so these are the the three most important the notifications got to turn those off and then um under order default make sure you know what your quantity is for order default this is going to be the quantity that works if you use um point and click on the level two and I'll show you how to do that in just a second now the next thing that I want to make sure you guys are aware of um not so much a setting that you have to enable but you want to make sure you've got your hotkey set up correctly so I go under hotkeys right here here and then I go down to active Trader and I make sure this is checked enabled then all I do is I set up a hotkey for buy ask for buy market for sell bid for sell market and for sell ask and for cancel all open orders so we've got six hot Keys here and that really is is all that I need just as like a minimum so the way I have this set up I'll show you my keyboard right here so I have this set up where shift one and shift two are buy orders buying ask or buying market now for those of you guys that have used thinker swim before you can trade during the pre-market session on thinker swim from 700 a.m. until 9:30 the market officially opens at 9:30 right that's regular hours from 9:30 to 4 p.m. but you could trade pre-market and you could trade after hours with thinker swim however you cannot use Market orders pre-market or after hours and you cannot use stop orders pre-market or after hours so as a result some of the buttons that are shown here in the active Trader window simply don't work at that time of day so during the pre-market session so I use since the buy Market button only works during regular trading hours I have that to shift two and then shift one is buy ask so buying the ask is a limit order and the most I'm willing to pay is the ask but I'll be honest with you I'm not using either of these buttons very often in my trading I'll show you what I do instead however sell bid right here contrl Z I am using that and ALT Z cell Market I would use that during regular trading hours but I haven't had the opport I haven't been trading during regular trading hours because most of my trades so far have been pre-market and then control Q is to cancel all open orders so very quickly I could just press control Q cancels all open orders and that's it now I really like using this even though this is for a desktop computer this keyboard I like because I can Mouse really quickly right here I could typee in the ticker and then shift one I'm I'm moving very quickly I don't have to move my hand over here to grab a mouse somewhere it's all kind of right Consolidated in one little spot so all right so those are the settings uh that we've got to make sure you've got enabled all right turn on your hot keys and enable these settings under the general settings tab all right so we'll apply that now I'm going to um I'm actually going to switch to my um let's see I'll just switch to my other uh account this is a an account that has more than $25,000 in it it's not part of the small account challenge no trades in it yet today but if I was going to take a trade pre-market what I would have to do is I have to remember to change my time and force right here to from day to extend it I have to change that in order to trade pre-market and then what I'm typically doing is when I see a stock like this moving up and bzi is just actually squeezed up even higher it's now up 125% on the day which is great the only problem is with the small account challenge I can only take one trade a day I'm limited to a cash account so I can day trade until I run out of cash but for that first trade the only trade I took today I used all of my available buying power so I got one entry one exit $400 of profit and that's the only trade I can take I've got to wait till tomorrow to take another trade um but we'll talk about that trade in a moment so so anyways the way I have the ladder set up over here is if I press the control button then I can click here and this is going to be a limit order so I click buy limit just like that and it's going to execute one share so I'm in at 963 even though I was clicking up here around 10 my order goes in as a limit order and that's the most I'm willing to pay now if I want to turn around and sell I can just click the limit button I click the control button and I click on the bid on this side on the red side and just like that boom I'm selling and I'm out of the trade now during regular trading hours and this is is regular trading hours right now I could press shift two which is a market order button oh I've got to change my time and force today for Market orders so I could press shift two and I'm in with one share now I press alt Z and it sells that one share so just that quickly I could be getting in and getting out now of course the beauty of thinker swim is that there's no commissions so you literally can trade as much as you want if you want to trade like crazy you can trade like crazy now I'm going to be an advocate for my small account Chanel of trading precisely high quality setups so if we switch back to my uh small account here we'll go down to the cash account so on this uh platform right here or on this in this account right here I had this set for extended I had Auto send turned on that way it wouldn't bring up an order confirmation and what I did when bnz first started squeezing up at around $6 a share $7 a share I thought how many shares can I afford to buy so I said well I know I can buy 2,000 and then I said well can I buy 2500 I said N I don't think so so I'm going to buy 2,200 and that was the most shares I felt that I could afford just quick rough math so I knew that my account this morning had about $16,900 in it this current balance of 17,330 includes today's profit so with about $166,000 I thought yeah right 7 x 2 that's 14,000 plus you know a little bit more I could probably buy about 2200 shares now if I use the uh level two down here if I click on this level two how many shares will it send an order for will it be for 2200 shares no it's not because that level two is not part of active Trader active Trader right here is what controls this is the quantity for this window so the quantity if you're using the level two down here is going to be based on whatever you set under your order defaults under application settings order default here 500 shares so just be aware of that if you're trying to point and click using the level two window now what I'm actually going to do for you guys is um I'm going to put a link in the description where you can download my thinker swim layout and the layout includes um this active Trader window right here and it also includes my hotkeys so you can install that and use it exactly the same way that I'm using it there'll be a link pin at the top of the comments and Linked In the description and I'm also going to give you guys my stock selection PDF that walks you through the criteria that I have to decide whether or not a stock is even worth trading I also am including my micro pullback strategy PDF because that's one of my favorite setups now let's talk for a moment about this actual trade that I took on bzi okay so this morning bzi hits my stock scanners so you could see it's hting the scanners just hit a moment ago as it hit 1059 so these scanners are searching for stocks that right now in real time are moving higher so when bnz I first hit my scans this morning the second it hit the scan you know what I thought I know the stock I know the stock I remember the stock because of course I trade every single day and this was a stock that we traded just the other day the other day it squeezed from $3 all the way up here to N9 and then it pulled back as the day went on all right now this morning right here at 8:30 they came out with breaking news boom in an instant the stock started squeezing up in response to that news headline so that's what I love to see as it's squeezing up I'm pulling up the chart and I'm starting to do my due diligence I'm asking myself does this stock meet my five criteria of stock selection again I walk through those in the PDF which you guys can download so I immediately know that it does and I traded it a couple days ago because it of course met those same criteria at that time as as well so pretty much instantly I was like I'm going to want to trade this stock so I pull the stock up first in my main trading account which is uh light speed trading and I pull it up by just quickly typing the ticker so bzi boom I type it and now I'm looking at the level two I'm looking at the spread I'm looking at the bid the offer how many big buyers there are how many big sellers there are and I'm trying to figure out whether or not I think this stock has a potential to make a big move so as it first pops up on my scans I see it and we're going to go back here to where it first came up and I took my first entry to anticipate the break through 550 I got in at about 541 now this was a little bit of a Chase because it first pops up here it dips down and as it rips back up right here I got in anticipating that we were going to break through that half dollar so I got in at 540 with a stop at about 520 so I'm risking about 20 per share I add at 5 uh 50 552 and as it squeezes up here to this peak of 575 I take some profit then it dips down right here and I add back in my main account I got a nice trade on this up to 645 which was great it pulls back again and I get another trade as it pushes higher now in thinker swim I then am starting to think all right where can I get a trade on this in my thinker swim account because I I knew that I wanted to trade it now the first spot where I wanted to trade was actually right here on this pullback the reason I like this area from my thinker swim account was because that was our first one minute micro pullback the micro pullback strategy is to set up that trade pretty much every day when we have a stock that's moving quickly so this was occurring uh it's a little bit hard to see actually on the one minute chart right now but I'll you can get zoomed in here so this peak right here at about 680 it then pulls back for a moment pulls back for another moment and it pushes higher right there so as it pushed higher right there I tried to get in and I fumbled so you know what I think happened is uh let me pull up thinker swim so what I think happened here was I had it entered for 2200 shares and I had my button right here to buy and then I have to press uh the control button to change it from a stop order to a limit order see how it changes so I'm holding this button here here and I clicked and I think when I clicked I must have clicked here or or or on this side but I clicked outside this green column this is the funny thing is your buy order only works if your mouse is inside this green column and I must have just slipped right outside it and clicked the buy button and no naturally nothing happened and basically I had what would have been a fantastic entry down here at about 660 for 2200 shares and it rips up to 705 and I was like gosh darn it so I missed that trade I missed it in both my small account and my big account then it pulls back right here and this is where I said all right I'm taking a trade so I ended up getting in right here at about $7 and right here it pops up to a high of uh let's see the high there was about 715 yeah it was 730 actually the double top was 730 we tapped 730 we pulled back we broke through it we hit 7 74 44 and I took my profit and then we dipped down and just like that this was in a matter of less than a minute I took that micro pullback and locked up $4 and what was it $32 of profit $432 of profit so it's another solid green trade now if we go back and we look at thinker swim or sorry we look at um Trader view I can actually um let's see we're going to switch this to thinker swim here and we're going to look at the trades I've taken so far as part of this challenge so right now I am sitting with um $4,310.27 so there was one day I took two trades and I have one loser so far and it was $154 so my average losers are 154 right that's the only loser I have my average winners right now are $637 which is a great that's a 4:1 profit to loss ratio so just for the sake of argument with a 4 to1 profit to loss ratio I would still be profitable even if my accuracy I would break even at 25% if my accuracy was 35% 40% I would still be making money but because my accuracy is 87.5% I'm doing really well so I'm growing the account I'm focusing on quick entries and quick exits average hold time for winners right now showing at 4 minutes average hold time for losers showing at 2 minutes so I'm being very disciplined I'm not overstaying my welcome and I'm basically harnessing the ther swim platform to help me get in and out of the market quickly that's what's important I need to be able to move fast because when we look at a stock like this you know look at how fast it hit 744 and then it's back down at 7 so right there I went up 40 cents a share with 2,000 shares it's 800 bucks and then back to break even you've got to be able to take your profit off the table and some of these stock can be extremely volatile now the fact is I am craving that volatility this is what I'm looking for I'm not going to trade stocks that aren't volatile because I'm not going to be able to grow my account but I have to be thinking about risk look at this candle it drops all the way down to seven and then bounces up to eight right in that area my concern was that I couldn't I wouldn't be able to afford to manage risk so I'm trying to trade these early in the move and for those of you guys that have been um maybe perhaps studying for a while one of the things that I'll share with you is that the one minute chart I find that the cleanest trades consistently are the first leg of the move right here before the first macd crossover so the macd is our moving average convergence Divergence indicator and it crosses right oops uh right there so once we get that first crossover and that was right there as we broke below vwap that's usually when it starts to get choppy so I had already locked up $110,000 of profit in my main account plus the $400 right there in my small account now as it turns out this did come up for a second move right here right at the open we we dropped and then we ripped back up now the problem is it would have been very easy to get in right here or perhaps right here a little prematurely get stopped out and then it rips and then you've got look at these large bottoming tail candles what we know about bottoming tail candles is that the stock is flushing down and although it's bouncing back up which is good the fact that it's Flushing down is concerning then you have this rejection up here at 8 that results in a halt down so big volatility goes all the way down to six down here 650 then it comes back up and this forms what we would call an ABCD pattern and that's not a bad pattern it's really not but what's interesting to me is that this big breakout is actually on lighter total volume than this candle right here usually as we get further into the day the volume decreases as Traders just recognize they're taking more and more risk trading this stock I mean look at these candles this one goes from 9 to 1050 back to 9 and that's these are one minute candles so if you're not fast in thinker swim you're going to get run over by the time you're pressing the buy button you're going to get filled way up here by the time you're pressing the sell button you're going to get filled back here you're going to buy high and sell low now that's the opposite of what you want to be doing of course you'd love to buy low and sell high but as an active Trader trading a stock that's up 125% % really the best you can do is buy high and sell higher but that means you've got to be very quick on your toes when the Stock's not looking good you got to be able to jump out very quickly and when it does look good you want to jump in quickly and you want to make sure your order is getting filled exactly where you think it's going to get filled so for me I have been fumbling a little bit with thinker swim it's not as fast as the platform I'm used to on a day-to-day basis and there's a couple of reasons for this one of the things that is tough about think or Swim premarket is that let's say I take this trade for 2,200 shares I press the buy button but let's just say for the sake of argument that I only fill you know 1,00 something so then it's going to show my open position right here at however many I got filled so let's say it's 1137 so I'm in at 1137 shares and now all of a sudden if I go to click the sell bid or sell ask the orders can get rejected because I don't actually hold 2200 shares so now I got to quickly click one of these that's too many that's too few so I could quick quickly click this and click sell Market or sell bid sell ask pre-market I I can't do sell Market um but to get the rest out I then have to type uh 6 600 what is it 630 37 shares right and and I find that just that the time I'm spending typing and then ah shoot a typo 400 shares it's clumsy and and then I got to go grab my mouse and then I'm missing my quick entries and exits now you can go and add a flatten button button here the problem with the flatten button is this will flatten your position so I'll just show you how this works um and I'll switch back to my uh account that's not part of the challenge for a second so um so let's say I do whatever four shares so I I'll buy Market the four shares oh we got to switch to day all right so we're going to buy Market I'm in four shares now and I'm G to click flatten so it takes me out but how does it sell it's selling with a market order so Market orders don't work pre-market or after hours that flap flatten button doesn't even work pre-market or after hours it only works during regular trading hours so as a result if I get a partial fill I'm really fumbling and what's really nice about the software that I'm using over here is that if I go into settings and I go to custom orders and I go to sell let me just go down here sell bid full position it's selling on the bid and the position is my full position it doesn't matter if I'm holding 2400 2200 a perfect number or I'm holding 1137 shares it's going to automatically put my full position and sell it now I have another hotkey here which is to sell half position so it's going to just take half my position and the awesome thing with that is I can very quickly be in and out of the market right so I'll just show you for for example here um let's see so this is my retirement account I'll switch to my non-retirement account for a second there's going to be I pay income tax on my non-retirement account but I'll just take a loss here so it doesn't matter so um so let's just say you know 129 shares I'll just buy right there all right so I'm in 129 shares I'll show you right here all right so 129 shares as you can see and now I'm going to press the button to sell half I've got 64 sell half 32 and I'm telling you okay now I got to type in 32 or I want to do 16 it's a lot faster just to press control X and it sells half for you contrl XTR XTR x contrl x and then you sell the rest contrl Z so for me that button is such a GameChanger compared to think or Swim and the other button that's a game changer is that I can go into my custom orders and I can click a buy order for buy2 shares and I can press the offset to be 10 cents above the ask which means when I press that button the order is not going through at 141 which is by ask it's going through at 151 and the advantage there is that if we have a stock that's moving really quickly I can fill my full order uh without getting a partial fill generally speaking so I don't usually get partial fills in my main account in my main account I can usually get in and get out with a full position but over in thinker swim I've been getting partial fills and then the tough thing with partial fills is that gosh darn it now I've got to type in a funny number of shares and I've also had a couple times where I click the buy button here you know for whatever it is and the order is just slow to execute it takes 3 seconds it takes 4 seconds and you're sitting there you're like hello what's going on and then finally it fills so you know I think this is kind of the the thing if you pay you you get what you pay for finger swim is free the platform is free the commissions are free 's no commissions so you can't expect it to be uh the the absolute highest performing platform you you get you're getting a free platform and does it work it works can you grow a small account I can grow a small account and I've been doing this for a long time so I should say my results aren't typical but you know it's just got some limitations so I think for most Traders not for all Traders but I think for most Traders you'll get to a point where you say all right I'm doing well with thinker swim trading with you know a couple thousand shares I can make $400 $500 a day a th000 a day but I think at a certain point especially if you're trying to trade quickly you're going to want faster software now if you're someone who's trading 50,000 shares or 100,000 shares and you're buying and you're holding and holding and holding you're taking longer positions then I think in that particular instance you're actually okay with thinker swim because Big Share size cost more money at fast Brokers because because fast Brokers they charge you a commission so you're paying for commission whereas with thinker swim it's commission free so either way you decide to do it I think it's fine it's really whatever is the best fit for you and look if you found this episode helpful I hope you hit the thumbs up I hope you subscribe the channel and I hope you download The Thinker swim layout my small account strategy PDF my stock selection PDF and my micro pullback strategy PDF the links for all those downloads will be pinned at the top of the comments and in the description so make sure you check that out and I'll remind you as always that trading is risky my results aren't typical so manage your risk take it slow and I'll see you for the next upload here real soon