ThinkOrSwim Active Trader
I absolutely love the ThinkOrSwim trading platform – for a retail trader, it is a modern day wonder. They keep coming up with cool features month-after-month.
I will share with you some of the cool features that exist in the Active Trader screen of ToS software. You can access this screen by clicking the Trade tab and then the Active Trader sub-tab.
The active trader screen offers various choices as to what all you want to see. The choices are to the very right of the screen. The choices you have are:
- Time & Series –
- Active Trader
- Chart
- Dashboard
- Level II
- News
This screen is most useful for day-trading and most definitely scalping futures or whatever security that you are dealing with. Additionally even if you are not scalping, one can look at the bid sizes, ask sizes, volume built up at various price levels to see what the potential reversal points could be. Below is a screen shot (from my paper-trading account. It shows that I am short 1 ES contract with out any stops or limit buy orders in place as of now) of the active trader screen that I took few minutes ago.
ToS just added two new cool features – “One click Reverse” and “One click Flat”. Former means that with a single click, I can go from long to short and vice versa. The position size remains the same. Latter means that with one click, I can cancel all the positions that I have on that security.
The other feature that I like is 5 levels of bid and ask sizes. By comparing the bid sizes and ask sizes, one can figure out if there is buying pressure or selling pressure. Finally combining bid sizes and ask sizes with the vertical volume chart on the left is very useful in determining where the ES might pause and what are the regions that it could zip through. One thing to keep in mind is that the volume chart only shows the intra-day volume and often where the ES would pause or zip through also depends on the volume built up on past days. So merely relying on the volume that you can see here is not the best thing. But in absence of any other information, it is still useful than not having anything else.
