Hey Market Pilots,
How is a new trader supposed to learn to trade other than looking at historical charts or experiencing it live, one day at a time? In the old days, these were the only two options and while studying historical charts has been the most common, I believe it presents some gaps when it comes to how we as humans learn.
Learning how to trade in real-time has its own issues. Mainly being too slow as you have to let each day or minute go by in order to see the results of trade setups. The benefit though is that you can’t cheat yourself like you can by studying historical charts. With historical charts, you see the full picture all at once which makes it easy to look at the full duration of a stock chart and simply say here was the right entry and there was the right exit. Of course, that is easy to point out when all the information of the chart is fully formed in front of you.
So without the ability to cheat, how do you study the entirety of a stock’s chart flow by seeing the whole move all at once? We are fortunate enough to live in a modern era where so much is online and we can record data without limitations. With these advances, ThinkorSwim has essentially utilized the idea of a DVR and applied it to the stock market. This technology, called OnDemand, allows us to relive historical chart movements as if it were live but with controls to fast-forward, rewind, or skip to any particular date. This is revolutionary because we can study the whole view of a chart and determine where we would enter and exit. But then we can dive into OnDemand and trade that section of chart as if it were real-time.
One major perk of this is being able to see how moving averages change in real-time. In historical charts, it is easy to see when price bounces off something like a 50 SMA or a 200 SMA. But in real-time, price may bounce off an area, and only later will it look like price bounced off that particular moving average because of the delay in forming those moving averages because they are lagging indicators. So while it looks easy and clear to simply buy when price bounces off a moving average, in reality, it may not line up as clearly when live. The OnDemand feature allows you to see this phenomenon in a compressed amount of time because you can fast-forward in minutes or in days and observe the moving average develop in relation to price right before your eyes.
Utilizing the OnDemand feature of ThinkorSwim was the number one way I learned how to trade and shortened the amount of time I needed to experience the market in real life. It kept me from cheating myself when looking at the chart as a whole and gave me the opportunity to practice a particularly difficult section of a move over and over as if it were live. I tell myself and subscribers all the time to take advantage of this wonderful gift that technology has given us and use it to our significant benefit. OnDemand is an excellent tool and I feel it is underutilized by most of us out there.
Do you use this feature? Let me know in the comments below. And if you don’t, be sure to take a look.
Over and Out,
Your Profit Pilot
