thinkorswim is Charles Schwab’s advanced trading platform, and it is free. It came to Schwab through the acquisition of TD Ameritrade, and it now runs on Schwab accounts using Schwab login credentials. The appeal for an active trader is direct: institutional-grade charting, scanning, and order execution at no subscription cost, with no commission on US-listed stock trades.
The catch is the first impression. Opening thinkorswim for the first time means facing a wall of tabs, panels, and buttons built to serve everyone from a buy-and-hold retiree to a full-time scalper, and most of the defaults are tuned for the former. Turning the platform into a fast active-trading tool is largely a matter of configuration, and the most important changes happen before the first chart even loads.
thinkorswim comes in three forms: Desktop, Web, and Mobile for iPhone, Android, and iPad. This guide covers the Desktop version, which is the most capable of the three and the one most serious traders run.
Getting in: download, login, and paperMoney
The platform is downloaded from inside a Schwab account, not from an app store. After logging into schwab.com, the path is the Trade menu, then Trading Platforms, then the option to download thinkorswim desktop. Some account types have to be enabled for thinkorswim first, and a prompt on that page walks through how. Once installed, the application opens to a login screen that takes the same Schwab ID and password used for the website, with two-factor authentication if the account requires it.
Live trading vs paperMoney
The login screen offers a choice before any credentials are entered: Live Trading or paperMoney. paperMoney is the built-in simulator. It runs the same platform with live market data and hypothetical funds, so a trader can practice order entry, test a new indicator, or rehearse a strategy with no money at risk. The practice account starts with $200,000 by default, and the Adjust Account function, which appears only on the simulated side, can reset that balance or resize it up or down.
Both modes can run at the same time by launching the application a second time and logging into the other. Anyone doing this should change the color scheme on one of the windows, through the Setup gear, Application Settings, then Look and Feel, where the platform switches between light and dark. The distinction matters. A dark live window next to a light practice window removes any chance of firing a real order that was meant for the simulator. paperMoney also labels itself “Simulated trading” in the top-left corner as a second safeguard.
The first settings every active trader should change
Two defaults work against intraday traders, and both take seconds to fix.
The first is quote speed. Out of the box, thinkorswim delays quotes by up to 3 seconds, because most of its users are long-term investors who never notice. Under the Setup gear, in Application Settings then System, the quote speed can be switched to real-time with no delay, at no extra charge. A day trader working off 3-second-old prices is effectively trading blind, so this is the single most important change to make on day one.
The second is memory. The login window has its own settings cog in the bottom-left corner, with minimum and maximum memory values that ship at their lowest setting. Raising both gives the application more of the machine’s RAM to work with and keeps it from lagging during fast markets. If performance degrades mid-session, the Help tab has a System subtab with a collect-garbage button that frees up memory on the spot. Closing the application at the end of each trading day, rather than leaving it running overnight, also keeps it responsive.
How the platform is laid out
Across the top sit nine tabs: Monitor, Trade, Analyze, Scan, MarketWatch, Charts, Tools, Education, and Help. Each one carries its own row of subtabs that change depending on which tab is active. Learning what lives where is most of the battle, because nearly every feature is either one of these tabs or a gear icon inside one.
Down the left edge runs the sidebar, made up of panels Schwab calls gadgets. A fresh install shows Live News, a Trader TV feed, a watchlist, and a quick chart. Any of these can be removed with an X or added with the plus button, with one exception. The Account Info gadget cannot be deleted, only hidden, because it holds the numbers every trader needs at a glance: net liquidation value, available cash, and day trades used. The watchlist is the gadget most traders lean on, since it keeps a live read on the names they care about while they work elsewhere on the platform.
Charts
A chart loads by typing a ticker into the box at the top-left of the Charts tab. Time frame is controlled by the dropdown marked with a letter, where “D” means each candle represents one trading day. The dropdown holds a list of favorite time frames and a Time Frame subtab for building custom ones.
The piece that trips up new users is the difference between aggregation period and time interval. The aggregation period is how much price action each candle holds, and the time interval is how far back the chart reaches. thinkorswim caps the interval based on the aggregation: a 1-minute chart reaches back 30 days at most, a 5-minute chart 180 days, hourly charts further still, and a daily chart can run all the way to a stock’s first day of trading. Push the interval past a cap and the platform quietly bumps the aggregation up to compensate.
Making charts readable
The default chart is cluttered and washed out. The settings cog on the chart itself opens the controls worth changing. A few that earn their place: turning on Show Trades plots a trader’s own fills on the chart; adding a few bars of expansion area on the right keeps the latest candle from slamming into the edge; filling in the up candles and coloring volume bars by direction makes the tape readable at a glance. On the Equities tab, Show Volume and corporate-action markers can be toggled. If the volume bars overlap the price candles awkwardly, unchecking overlap volume drops them into their own pane below.
Once a chart looks right, the style can be saved under the Style menu and loaded onto any future chart in two clicks, which removes the tedium of rebuilding the look every time. A handy reset trick: double-clicking the price axis or the date axis snaps the zoom back to a sensible default after a chart has been dragged out of shape.
Studies and drawings
Indicators in thinkorswim are called studies, and the platform ships with more than 300 of them. They live under the Studies menu, in Edit Studies, where a search box finds any common indicator and a double-click adds it. Some studies, such as moving averages, overlay directly on price. Others, such as RSI or MACD, drop into a separate pane beneath the chart. Each study’s settings cog controls its length, inputs, colors, and which plots show, and studies can be dragged to reorder them or stacked into a single pane. A configured set can be saved and reloaded as a study set, and Remove All Studies wipes the chart clean in one move.
Drawings work the same way. The drawing tools are reached through the Drawings menu, by pressing the mouse wheel on the chart, or by right-clicking. Trend lines and price levels cover most needs, with Fibonacci levels, shapes, text, and arrows available beyond them. Right-clicking a drawing opens its properties to change extensions, color, style, and width, and saving those as default applies them to every future drawing of that type. Drawings can even be placed on the lower study panes, not just on price.
For anyone who outgrows the built-in studies, thinkorswim has its own scripting language, thinkScript, which builds custom studies, scan filters, and chart columns. Shared scripts are imported through the Setup menu under Open Shared Item by pasting a share link, previewing, and importing.
Placing and managing trades
There are two ways to trade. The Trade tab is the conventional route, and the Active Trader window is the fast one.
On the Trade tab’s All Products subtab, the header for a symbol shows the last price, the day’s gain or loss in dollars and percent, the current bid and ask, the listing exchange, and an ETB flag that marks a stock as easy to borrow for short selling. Clicking the ask price starts a buy order; clicking the bid starts a sell. The same shortcut works anywhere a bid or ask appears, including inside a watchlist. The order editor at the bottom defaults to a limit order good for the day. Confirm and Send opens the order confirmation dialog, which is the last checkpoint before anything goes live, and Send commits it.
Order types and time-in-force
A market order fills immediately at the best available price and will chew through price levels until the whole order is done, which makes it fast but exposes it to slippage in thin or fast-moving stocks. A limit order sets the worst acceptable price and protects against slippage, but it can sit unfilled even when the price prints at that level, because a counterparty still has to take the other side. Time-in-force governs how long an order lives: a DAY order expires at the close, while a GTC order, good till canceled, persists across sessions. Right-clicking any order offers cancel or cancel-and-replace, and Mac users reach the same menu with Command-click.
Limit orders also force a choice on entry: buy at the ask or buy at the bid. Buying the ask takes liquidity and fills reliably; buying the bid joins the queue for a better price and may never fill. On fast momentum names, taking the ask is the better default, because a missed entry costs far more than a penny of price. On slower, liquid names where timing is relaxed, resting on the bid earns the better fill.
The Active Trader ladder
The Active Trader window opens from a tab on the right edge of the chart, and it is where speed lives. Its default buttons are buy market and sell market, but they are fully customizable: a trader can swap them for buy ask, sell bid, or any combination, and drag them into the preferred order. A second row sets order quantity. The Auto Send checkbox skips the confirmation dialog entirely, which is worth turning on for active trading, since one extra click can cost real money on a moving stock. The tradeoff is that there is no second look before the order fires.
The lower portion of the window is the trade ladder. It shows the size resting on the bid and the ask at each price, plus the volume already traded at each level, which is a quick read on where size is stacking up and where price may struggle. Clicking inside a bid or ask cell drops a limit or stop order at that exact price in a single click, and orders can then be dragged up or down the chart or killed with an X. Three buttons are worth setting up deliberately: Cancel All, which clears every open order at once; Flatten, which cancels open orders and market-sells the entire position; and Reverse, which flips a long into a short.
Bracketed exits
The template dropdown in the Active Trader window is where exits get built, and it solves a problem that confuses new users. On the Single template, only one order can rest on a position’s shares, so a profit target and a stop-loss cannot both be attached at once. The other templates exist for exactly this. OCO, one cancels the other, pairs two orders so that filling one automatically cancels the other. Target with bracket places a profit limit and a protective stop around an entry together, the same arrangement most traders actually want. A trailing-stop variant swaps the fixed stop for one that follows price, and the two- and three-bracket versions scale out of a position across several levels rather than all at once.
Monitoring positions
The Monitor tab is mission control for everything already placed. Its Activity and Positions subtab lists the day’s working orders, filled orders, and canceled orders, and it resets every morning, with the full record kept under Account Statement. Each open position shows quantity, the trade price paid, the mark or current market value, the open profit and loss including the current day, and the buying-power effect for margin accounts. The columns are customizable from hundreds of choices, so a trader can add something like sector at will. Right-clicking a position and choosing create closing order populates the exact opposite trade, ready to send, and positions can be sorted into groups for traders running many at once.
Scanning for stocks
The Scan tab is the platform’s built-in screener, and it is deep. The top bar sets the universe to scan, whether that is all stocks, the S&P 500, or another index. An exclude option drops whole categories, and excluding over-the-counter stocks is worth doing as a habit, because unlike listed names they carry a per-order commission and tend to be low quality.
Filters are grouped into conditions that must all be true, or any be true, or none be true. There are four working filter types. Stock filters cover price, volume, market capitalization, and percent change. Option filters feed the Option Hacker subtab, which scans option chains rather than stocks. Fundamental filters reach company data such as earnings-per-share growth, dividends, and margins, often with year-over-year variants. Study filters apply chart-based conditions, and they are where scanning gets powerful: an RSI below 40, a 50-period moving average above the 200, a breakout to new highs. Study filters work only on the live side of the platform, not in paperMoney, and they run against a chosen time frame. A small but important distinction lives here, between an operator like “crosses above,” which has to happen on the current bar, and “is greater than,” which describes a current state.
A finished scan is saved as a query, loaded into a watchlist gadget, and linked to a chart by color, so that clicking any result charts it instantly. Because scan columns update live with every tick, a sorted scan reorders itself in real time, pushing the strongest names to the top as the session moves.
Building a trading workspace
thinkorswim lets a trader assemble multiple charts and tools into one screen. The Charts tab builds square grid layouts, while the Flexible Grid subtab allows more modular, irregular arrangements. Linking windows by color syncs the symbol across all of them, so typing one ticker updates every linked pane at once.
A practical day-trading layout uses three charts and a trade window: a daily chart for overall bias, an hourly for the intermediate picture, and a 5-minute for execution, with the fourth pane switched from a chart to an Active Trader window so orders fire from the same screen as the analysis. The layout saves as a grid, and the entire setup saves as a workspace from the top Setup menu, which preserves layouts, styles, and studies together. Any window can be detached through its menu and pushed to a second monitor. Settings persist between sessions, so a saved style or study set returns on its own, and named grids let a trader flip between a swing setup, a scalping setup, and a reversal setup in a single click.
After-hours and 24/5 overnight trading
The regular US session runs 9:30 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. ET. Outside it, Schwab offers extended sessions across all its platforms, but thinkorswim adds an around-the-clock session the standard platforms do not have, and that capability is one of the platform’s clearest advantages.
The sessions break down as follows:
- Pre-market: 7:00 a.m. to 9:25 a.m. ET. Orders for it can be entered from 8:05 p.m. the prior trading day.
- After-hours: 4:05 p.m. to 8:00 p.m. ET.
- Extended hours, 13 hours continuous: 7:00 a.m. to 8:00 p.m. ET, available on all Schwab platforms.
- Extended plus overnight, 24 hours continuous: thinkorswim only, running from 8:00 p.m. ET Sunday to 8:00 p.m. ET Friday, with brief 5-minute closures around the regular session. It covers more than 1,100 names, including every S&P 500, Nasdaq 100, and Dow 30 stock plus over 600 ETFs.
The rules in these sessions change how a trader operates. Only limit orders execute outside regular hours, so market and stop orders will not fill there. thinkorswim tags time-in-force by session: EXT AM for pre-market, EXT PM for after-hours, EXT 13h for the 13-hour window, and EXTO 24h for the overnight session, with day orders expiring at 8:00 p.m. ET unless set to GTC. Quotes are not consolidated the way they are in regular hours. thinkorswim displays mark, bid, ask, and size in every session, but Level 2 depth appears only in pre-market and after-hours, and during the overnight session the live last-trade price is not shown. The names eligible for overnight trading are found in the Watchlists menu under Public, then 24 Hour Trading. One detail matters for pattern-day-trade math: the trading day rolls over at 8:00 p.m. ET when the overnight session opens, so a trade closed just after 8:00 p.m. counts against a different day than one closed just before.
Trading options on thinkorswim
The option chain sits on the Trade tab’s All Products subtab. After a ticker and an expiration date are selected, calls appear on the left and puts on the right, and the number of strikes shown can be set directly. As with stock, clicking the ask buys and clicking the bid sells. The default order quantity for options is 10, changed under Setup, Application Settings, then Order defaults.
The standout option workflow is one-click trading through the chart. Right-clicking a contract in the chain and choosing Send To a linked chart color charts that option’s price as if it were a stock, and the Active Trader window then loads the contract, so it can be traded with the same ladder and the same single clicks used for shares. Studies and drawings apply to the option’s chart just as they do to a stock’s.
Where to get help inside the platform
thinkorswim keeps its learning resources in-platform so a trader does not have to leave to find an answer. The Education tab embeds Schwab’s articles, videos, and courses, and the Learning Center houses the thinkManual, a full reference with a glossary of platform terms. A Support chat connects directly to the trade desk from inside the application, useful for a question about a stuck order or an unfamiliar screen without reaching for the phone. For a platform this dense, the help for almost anything is a tab away.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is thinkorswim and is it free?
thinkorswim is Charles Schwab’s advanced trading platform, available free with a Schwab account and carrying no commission on US-listed stock trades. It came to Schwab through the acquisition of TD Ameritrade and now runs on Schwab login credentials. It comes in Desktop, Web, and Mobile versions, with Desktop the most capable and the one most serious traders run.
What is paperMoney on thinkorswim?
paperMoney is thinkorswim’s built-in simulator, offered as a choice on the login screen before any credentials are entered. It runs the same platform with live market data and hypothetical funds, starting with $200,000 by default, so a trader can practice order entry or rehearse a strategy with no money at risk. Live and paperMoney can run side by side by launching the application twice, and changing one window’s color scheme guards against firing a real order meant for the simulator.
What settings should an active trader change first in thinkorswim?
The most important change is quote speed: out of the box thinkorswim delays quotes by up to three seconds, and switching to real-time with no delay under Application Settings then System costs nothing and is essential for intraday trading. The second is memory, raised from its default low setting in the login window’s settings cog to keep the application from lagging in fast markets. Both take seconds and should be done on day one.
Can you trade overnight on thinkorswim?
Yes. Beyond the regular session and standard extended hours, thinkorswim offers a 24-hour continuous session that the standard Schwab platforms do not, running from 8:00 PM ET Sunday to 8:00 PM ET Friday and covering more than 1,100 names including every S&P 500, Nasdaq 100, and Dow 30 stock plus over 600 ETFs. Only limit orders execute outside regular hours, so market and stop orders will not fill there. The eligible names are listed in the Watchlists menu under Public, then 24 Hour Trading.