Happy March swimmers! And what a busy month it is. There are all sorts of interesting things going on that we can focus our attention to. There’s women’s history, Mardi Gras, St. Paddy’s Day, basketball, daylight savings, and the first day of spring to name a few. Here in our neck of the woods, we’ve decided to focus most of our attention on optimization. As always, one of our top priorities is to keep the thinkorswim® platform running as smoothly as possible. A good chunk of our time has been spent going back and fine-tuning features both old and new. A little bit of spring cleaning, if you will. That doesn’t mean we don’t have anything worth mentioning though!
Walk Limit
This first one is something we’ve been working to bring your way for a while now. We’re very excited to announce the thinkorswim platform now has a Walk Limit® order type!
This order type is a unique Schwab offering for option traders. These orders are available for options strategies spanning one to four legs and are available to users with real-time data. Just one thing to note, it can only be chosen for stock and ETF options strategies.
If you’re not familiar with this type of order and are wondering why you might want to try it out, we’re happy to explain! A Walk Limit order can be helpful if there is a wide bid/ask spread since the order can “work” in the market from the bid to the ask (or vice versa) without manual updates to the order. The width of the bid/ask spread will dictate how many price “walks” you would like the order to take.
There’s a lot more to say about this nifty new order type, so we decided it needed its own dedicated page. Come read about all the ins and outs here!
View Trades from Trade Count Column
Another option we’ve introduced to the Active Trader ladder is the ability to View Trades from the Trade Cnt (Trade Count) column. This way you don’t need to switch tabs to see this information. To make use of this, the first step is to add the Trade Cnt column to the ladder. You can do so by clicking the Gear icon to the right of the last column header listed in the ladder. This will reveal a drop-down menu where you can choose Customize, and a new window will appear titled Customize Active Trader. Find the Trade Cnt in the Available Items list, then add it and click OK. Once added, you can now hover over the values in the column and click to View Trades.
View “Fills” Dates
Similar to the previously mentioned column, we’ve also added the ability to View Fill Dates to the Fills column in the Active Trader Ladder. Just like before, to make use of this, the first step is to add the Fills column to the ladder. You can do so by clicking the Gear icon to the right of the last column header listed in the ladder. This will reveal a drop-down menu where you can choose Customize, and a new window will appear titled Customize Active Trader. Find Fills in the Available Items list, then add it and click OK. Once added, you can now hover over the values in the column and click to View Fills. Something to keep in mind is, this will only display filled trades at the price that was clicked.
Note: Currently, the fills column shows the cumulative fills that occurred for your account at the specific price level. In the very near future this will reflect both the number of buy and sell fills at the price.
Lot Details View
Speaking of viewing previous trades, you can now view your individual tax lots via thinkorswim under the Lot Detail tab! thinkorswim users have been asking for this for a long time and StreetSmart Edge® users were fans, so it was a no brainer to add this to our collection. If you trade using a tax lot method that is anything other than FIFO for your orders, then this view might be right up your alley. It can be accessed by clicking on Qty, Trade Price, or P/L Open from the monitor, account statement, or analyze tabs and then clicking on the Lot Detail tab on the pop-up window.
If you’ve gotten this far then a big thank you for taking the time to read about the things we’ve been up to! This is the end of another release for us, but there will always be lot’s more to come. We can’t wait to share what’s next and hope to see you there!
Happy trading,
The Support Team
thinkorswim