ThinkorSwim (TOS) has become an integral part of every self-directed investor as well as institutional users who want to invest in stocks, bonds, mutual funds, equities, futures, and so forth. This trading software platform offers you financial mastery services like trading tools and market analytics. To enjoy these benefits, you have to familiarize yourself with the various aspects of Thinkorswim.
For instance, you need to understand the main types of Thinkorswim indicators and how they can help you to invest successfully. If you’re new to this trading platform and you would like to use it for your investment undertakings, you should hire an experienced Thinkorswim expert to help you apply the available indicators to your investment processes.
Fortunately, many reliable online freelance job marketplaces offer hundreds, if not thousands, of experienced freelance Thinkorswim experts. For instance, you can find a good Thinkorswim programmer to help you apply TOS indicators to your everyday trading on a reliable freelance site like Guru.
Before you embark on the mission of finding a Thinkorswim developer to help you with the indicators, it’s important to familiarize yourself with the most common TOS indicators. This way, you’ll know what to expect from the programmer and the questions to ask them during the interview.
Types of Thinkorswim Indicators
Most traders, particularly those who rely on technical analysis for their trading activities, tend to concentrate on trends because prices are often changing very quickly. So, you should always try to catch the changing prices and ride on them no matter how short- or long-lived they may be. Always remember that the trend is your companion, so you shouldn’t fight it.
The sooner you identify a trend, the better chance you have of capitalizing on it. However, this is easier said than done. With so many uptrends and downtrends, you’ll face an uphill task trying to identify the best trends to exploit.
But all isn’t lost–there are numerous indicators that you can rely on to identify potential trends. Thinkorswim offers two main types of technical indicators that can help you identify the right trends easily: strategies and studies.
Strategies
This is a category of pre-defined Thinkorswim strategies, clustered alphabetically. The suffix “LE” indicates Long Entry strategies, while “SE” represents Short Entry strategies. Short Exit strategies are marked with the suffix “SX,” while Long Exit strategies are indicated as “LX.”
One of the most common TOS strategy indicators is Accumulation/Distribution, which was developed by Domenico D’Errico. He wanted to identify and apply market phases specified by Dow Theory. This strategy indicator identifies accumulation and distribution phases in the market, according to the range or the true average range compression–it also adds replicated buy and sell orders, respectively.
Another common TOS strategy indicator is EhlersStoch, an indicator based on Ehler’s stochastic study, which involves a stochastic oscillator and the use of the Roofing Filter. Both the filter and oscillator were developed by John F. Ehlers and are based on space analog filters.
You can also use the TrendFollowingStrat TOS indicator for your trading. It is a fluid average-based trading system that adds replicated orders based on price action concerning its moving average. You can enhance performance using stop-losses and profit targets by incorporating other TOS strategies like StopLossLX, ProfitTargetLX, etc.
Studies
This category of indicators offers built-in studies that will help you to identify potential trends for your trading. These studies are grouped alphabetically for ease of identification and application.
One of the most common TOS study indicators is AccountNetLiq, which plans the account net insolvency value, such as the value of the selected account when all the positions on the account need to be closed at the existing market price. The net liquidation value of the account is plotted in the form of a histogram on a lower subgraph. The colors of this histogram will change depending on how positive or negative the value is.
Finding the Right Programmer
Your programmer should be familiar with these TOS indicators and have experience applying them to trading. When you are hiring a developer to help you apply these indicators to your investment endeavors, make sure they have the skills needed to build your preferred TOS indicators and tools.
Fortunately, TOS offers step-by-step guides for building your preferred indicators and back-testers so that you can beat market volatility. Your TOS programmer should be able to leverage these tutorials to build reliable indicators for your trading–Guru has a wide selection of professional, freelance Thinkorswim experts who will be able to do just that.
