#28 - Trading Options With Thinkorswim
Hey everyone. Welcome back to the daily call. On today’s call, we’re going to talk about trading options with Thinkorswim. I think it’s just a big topic that a lot of people search for and so, I want to give my feedback and advice on Thinkorswim platform. I’ve been with Thinkorswim just as a background for a long time, pretty much since they opened up. I dare to say I was probably one of the first 50 customers that they had. I literally signed up when they had three web pages. It was like a homepage, the sing up page and then the legal description page. I’ve seen a lot of iterations. I’ve gone through Thinkorswim going public, getting bought out by TD Ameritrade and all of those changes. At the end of the day, I still think that the Thinkorswim platform is by far the best one for options traders. Now of course, this only really benefits you if you’re in a couple of different countries and mainly the US. I think that the technology is great. I think it’s pretty fast. The mobile responsiveness of their app is really, really good. It’s actually really improved in even like the last year or so. I consider it really like the jet cockpit of options trading. For that reason, I definitely suggest people go over to Thinkorswim. We are definitely a big supporter of Thinkorswim moving forward. Here are some of the drawbacks that I see to the Thinkorswim platform though. I think it’s too much and can be confusing to some people. There’s a lot of moving parts because they basically can do everything. They can do stocks, they can do options, futures, Forex, you name it. It can all be done from one platform. Now, while that’s great and that gives you a lot of different variety or options, (no pun intended) I think it can be confusing for people because there are so many different buttons to push and like I said, it’s a jet cockpit. It’s like you don’t want to push some buttons, but you kind of want to push a little bit of everything. For that reason, I think it’s a little bit confusing. I think to some degree, it’s a little bit antiquated still. I think design wise, it could obviously improve its very block and column formatted as far as layout. Other broker platforms that we’ve seen definitely have a much better appeal, much better UI, UX design, interface for users and I think that eventually, Thinkorswim knows they have to overhaul that, but they’re not in any rush. They’ve always been focused on speed and efficiency and the tools, not necessarily the design of it. I think that’s a drawback for me. If you’re going to stare at something all day, it should look pretty good. That’s why we focus so much on Option Alpha, just the design that we have because if you’re going to be in there and trading all day or basically going through our courses for a couple of weeks, it should look good. I think another drawback to Thinkorswim on the outside is the commission structures. When they were bought out by TD Ameritrade, TD basically jacked up the commissions for new accounts. We’ve talked about another weekly podcast on our main show this ability for you to actually get your commissions reduced which I still think is present. You can still get your commissions reduced by far and a lot of people do. Whatever they’re charging right now publicly, (I don’t want to say because it may change in the future based on when this podcast goes out) I definitely think that you can get your commissions reduced dramatically. Even going over to a different broker if you need to or suggesting the commission structure of a different broker, I think it’s not out of the realm of possibility to get your commissions cut by half or 80% or 90% in some cases based on what you sign up with. While that’s a drawback initially, it can be overcome and they are pretty flexible about doing that as long as you basically commit to them. That’s what I tell people all the time with broker commissions, is that they’re not just going to cut your commissions for no good reason. You either have to show commitment with frequency of trades that you do for a month or two or with the account size that you have by transferring more money or opening up more accounts. You have to show some sort of commitment to them and that’s really only fair. To wrap things up, if you’re trading options over Thinkorswim, it is really kind of the MACDaddy of options trading and that’s really what you should be on at this point. We’ll talk about in future podcast here what we plan to do as we potentially maybe even transition away from Thinkorswim in the future. Though right now at this exact moment, I don’t see us going anywhere at least right now. We’ll definitely be on Thinkorswim for a little while longer. If not, we’ll definitely have the account open, regardless of where we try to transition ourselves in the future. As always, hopefully you guys enjoyed this. If you have any comments or questions, let me know. Until next time, happy trading!
