How to Buy Stock on thinkorswim® Desktop

Narrator: Now, I'm going to show you probably the most important activity that a trader should know how to do on thinkorswim^®, and that's how to buy or sell a stock. First thing I'm going to do, though, is I'm going to collapse the left-hand sidebar by clicking this button.

That gives us some more real estate so I can show you the entire Trade tab, All Products subtab. And what we're looking at is, essentially, the current market for Apple stock. At the top here, we have the stock name, the last traded price, the gain or loss for the day based on dollars and percent, as well as the current bid and ask.

ETB stands for easy to borrow. So, if you were shorting Apple, it'd be an easy to borrow stock. And then where is the stock listed? It's currently listed on the Nasdaq^®. So, if we click this caret, you'll notice we have a bunch of different data points. This section is an extremely important section, but how do you actually buy and sell the stock? Well, it's pretty simple. You can do it in a number of ways.

The first thing let's imagine we wanted to buy 100 shares of Apple stock. I'm going to hover my mouse over the ask price, and you see there's a little buy badge that shows up under my mouse. If I were looking to sell Apple, you can see I hover my mouse over the bid and a sell button appears. Now, if I click the ask price, you see an order appears at the bottom to buy 100 shares of Apple at a floating limit price based on the current ask price. And it defaults to a limit order and a day order. We'll talk about that in a second. I'm going to delete this order real quick.

One other thing I want to point out, let's bring back our sidebar, you'll notice we had a bid/ask price in our watchlist columns. So, if I click on the ask price from the watchlist, guess what? That same order editor appears at the bottom of our screen. So moral of the story is, anytime you see a bid price, an ask price, or a main price next to a symbol name or lookup, you can enter an order from that part of the software. So once again, let's click on the ask price. I'm going to walk you through this order just really quickly. We have stock. We're buying 100 shares of Apple. Current limit price of $163.36, and it's a DAY order, which means, if we were to place this order, it would be good for today's trading date. Now, let's say we just want to get it filled. We can switch that to a MARKET order. We also have a number of different order types available in this order editor, but let's switch to a MARKET, which means we'll get filled that the best available ask price. Hit Confirm and Send.

Now, this section of the software is extremely important. It's the Order Confirmation Dialog. This is where you have your last chance to review an order, double, triple check all of this before you place your order. When you're ready, hit Send. And you'll notice up here at the top, we have some messages that appeared. We bought 100 shares of Apple. And then it goes away. So, what happened to that stock? Well, this is where we move over to our Monitor tab. And Monitor tab, Activity and Positions subtab, this will be the area for you to monitor all of your open positions as well as your activity for the trading day.

Well, under the Activity and Positions subtab section, we have today's trade activity. And this is where you'll see any of your working orders, your filled orders, you'll notice we have one fill, and that was the trade we just placed, as well as our canceled orders.

Now let's go back and do one more example. Let's say we wanted to buy another 100 shares of Apple, but this time we wanted to do it if Apple dropped down to $150. I'm putting my mouse in there and I'm entering a specific price. That padlock is now locked because it's no longer floating with the current market. And we have a limit order that's good for the day, and we're going to hit Confirm and Send.

And now if we go back to our Monitor tab, Activity and Positions, you'll notice how we now have a working order in our working orders section. And it's essentially all the details we just looked at. Now let's imagine, I want to place this order good till canceled, so that it works until either I cancel it or Apple fills it $150. You can right click. Now, in thinkorswim, the right click of the mouse is extremely important. If you're on a Mac, it would be the Command key and your mouse click button. But for PC users, if you right click your mouse, you'll see a menu will appear and we can cancel the order. We can cancel and replace the order. So, we want to cancel and replace this particular order. So, I'm going to change that, and I'm going to go here and change this to Good Till Canceled. Everything else stays the same. I'm going to hit Confirm and Send.

And now you can see we've got a message that our original day order was canceled. Back on the Monitor tab, we go back and you can see now we have an order working good till canceled. So, what happened to our original order? Well, we go down to canceled, and there it is. Cancelled Orders. Buy 100 shares of Apple, $150 limit for the day. We canceled that, replaced it with this good till canceled order. And you can see here, we have our filled order from a few minutes ago. So, this is, essentially, where you're going to keep track of all your orders for the current trading day. This will clear out and reset every single day, and all of your order history will then be found under the Account Statements subtab, the Order History section.

And that's how you buy and sell stock on thinkorswim desktop. For more great educational resources, including additional thinkorswim tutorials, head over to Insights & Education at schwab.com and don't forget to subscribe to our YouTube channel so you can get notified when we post new videos.

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