hey everyone thanks for checking out this video my name is Travis I'm the
creator of the master the market education that you can find linked below in the description
and I wanted to put together this quick video to explain a custom thinkorswim
volume indicator you can use and add to your charts in thinkorswim that I think
is very useful and the main reason for that is because in my opinion thinkorswim
is a great platform I mean it's one that I've used for years for most of my
technical analysis and charting but one thing that I really think they lacked is
actual volume stats volume information which can be a huge part of trading in
which is something that I use personally for almost every single one of my trades
so if you go ahead and zoom in on a chart and hover over one of the
candlesticks you can see up in the top right corner up here it's going to tell
you the volume for that specific handle I mean you can do that on in any
different time frame so right now wrong 5-minute chart but if we go to the daily
chart as well I'm you can zoom in and go ahead and hover over a candle and you
can see on this day there were 37 million shares traded of this stock so
that's pretty much the majority of what they provide as far as volume
information now there are actually a few other ways you can add volume indicators
and volume studies to your charts but one thing that I really like to see is
basically just the overall daily volume for the stock and then I'd like to see
how that current volume is comparing to past volume and then I also like to see
the average volume for that stock so all of that is going to be provided in the
custom thinkorswim volume indicator which you can see down here that I'm
going to share with you so basically this indicator is going to tell you five
main things all based around volume for any stock that you're currently
analyzing or trading on as long as you haven't pulled up on your chart and the
first of those is going to be the daily average and this is going to tell you
the average amount of volume or the average amount of shares traded over the
past 30 days believe it or not this is actually a very important number because
if a stock is trading for example just 10,000 shares on average per day that's
a very illiquid stock and that's going to be difficult for you to buy and sell
at the prices that you want to buy and sell that because there has to be
somebody else on the other side of that trade to actually buy or sell your share
so if there's only 10,000 chairs being traded on average on any given day and
you're somebody trying to buy you know a thousand or 2,000 shares at a time keep
in mind that there has to be somebody else to either sell those 2,000 shares
to you or buy those 2,000 chairs from you so in my opinion it's important to
see a daily average of at least 100,000 shares if this is a stock that you're
going to be buying into and potentially holding for multiple days the next
volume stat that you're going to see is today's volume and that is just how many
shares have been traded so far for the day after that you're going to see
today's percentage which is going to be a comparison of how today's volume
compares to the past 30 days so if we take the example at the bottom you can
see today's volume is about 55 million shares just about and then the daily
average is just about 15 million shares so today because the stock is trading
about 55 million shares and the daily average is just 15 million shares the
point today is about three hundred and sixty seven percent what it usually is
for this time of the day for this stock and more often than not when there's
high relative volume that also comes with some kind of news or catalysts
released by the company and then news along with the extra volume is usually
going to create a large amount of volatility which is what we want to see
when we are day trading stocks after that we have the average 30 bars and
this is just going to tell you the average volume over the past 30 bars and
that can be on any timeframe so the way that that differs from the daily average
is because we can be looking at the average volume over the past 30 bars on
the 5-minute chart meaning how many shares the stock is trading on average
for five minutes and that's but not least it's going to tell you the volume
for the current bar and again that can be on any timeframe as well so in this
case say for example we were looking at the 5 minute chart and the current bars
volume is at 172 thousand shares that means that so far in the past 5 minutes
the stock is traded 172 thousand shares I mean the same would be true if this
was the 15-minute chart that would just mean that so far in the past 15 minutes
the stock is traded 172 thousand shares and there's a ton of things you can do
with this information and it can really help you with any of your trading
regardless of the trading strategy that you're using so now I just
want to show you how you can actually add this to your charts so you can go
ahead and get started using it so once you open up your thinkorswim platform
and you have the chart pulled up that you want to add this custom thinkorswim
volume indicator to all you have to do is go up to the studies on the top right
and then go to edit studies once the Edit Studies box actually pops
up you're going to go ahead down here to create click on create and then go ahead
and delete the default that they have in there now for the next step or you're
going to have to do is copy and paste the think script which you can find at
the first link down below in the description it's going to bring you over
to this blog and basically my blog is just explaining to you everything that
we talked about within this video and if you scroll all the way down to the
bottom you're going to see the Finke script which is what you want to copy
and paste into the thinkorswim platform
and that's going to be the actual study itself so once you paste that in the
only thing that you have to do after that is give this study some kind of
name so we'll call it custom volume and then go down here and click on OK and go
ahead and apply it to your charts after you do that you're going to have these
thinkorswim custom volume indicator down here at the bottom of your charts and
you can see that again these last two here are going to be
based on the time frame that your chart is actually on so in this case were on
the 5-minute chart and you can see that on average in the past 35 minute candles
or the past 35 minute bars this stock has traded about 16,000 shares and if we
were to change this now to the one-minute chart you can see that the
indicator is actually going to adjust to the time for him on the chart and now
we're down to about 3,000 shares in the past 30 minutes broken up into
one-minute bars so anyway I hope you found this video helpful if you're
someone like me that uses thinkorswim and thinks that they can improve on some
of the volume stats and the volume indicators then I hope this is helpful
and I hope that you go ahead and apply this to your own charts but anyway
thanks for watching if you enjoyed make sure to give the video
and subscribe to the channel so you don't miss out on future videos and if
you're interested in learning more about day trading swing trading and even
long-term investing all of that along with exclusive market resources and
access to our trading chat room with over a thousand active traders can be
found on my website maps of the market which will be linked down below in the
description thanks again for watching I hope you enjoyed and good luck with your
trading