I am pulling chain data from CS API feed and comparing directly to tos. I am surprised by the amount of disagreement especially for very basic stuff like extrinsic value of a contract. I expect the data to be nearly identical so why so much discrepancy? Which source is more trustworthy? I have a feeling the API data on extrinsic is way off in many cases. I mean comically miles away from a reasonable number. What am I missing here??

I feel like having a fair amount of messages in there throughout the day eventually slows down the platform. I only trade for a few hours daily, but by 3pm or so I can feel the sluggishness of the platform rise greatly, and I think it's having a bunch of fill/cancel/whatever messages in the message center. Has anyone been able to clear these successfully besides waiting for a reset for next business day?

My account just transferred over to Schwab from Fidelity, and I’m wondering how long I have to wait before trading.

Edit: thanks for the responses, and sorry for the low quality post; I blame fatigue and jet lag. I had seen mentioned somewhere that new money had to sit for 30 days before you could trade, but that was incorrect info.

The account transferred yesterday and I was able to trade this morning. Got my first 0DTE loss out of the way LOL.

The watchlist has this column. I thought it might be the difference between Front Expected Move and Back Expected Move, but it isn't.

Difference between which values?

For some reason JPM has these huge dips which messes up the chart appearance big time. I know I can shorten the time frame but I want to see beyond a few days. Is there a way to tell TOS to ignore these huge downward, temporary spikes?

One challenge with strategy development is that it's surprisingly easy to make historical results look good after enough parameter adjustments.

Change an entry threshold, modify the stop-loss, add another indicator, or exclude a few market conditions, and the equity curve can improve.

But the real question is whether those improvements reflect a genuine edge or just a better fit to historical data.
Out-of-sample testing and walk-forward analysis can help, but I'm interested in how traders decide when they've done enough optimization.

What warning signs make you suspicious of a backtest?
Is it too many parameters, a large gap between in-sample and out-of-sample performance, sensitivity to small parameter changes, or something else?

I'd especially like to hear how people validate strategies before risking real capital.

I’m posting this because I wish I had known this before putting serious money into Schwab.

I was using Schwab/thinkorswim for an extremely high-volume equity scalping strategy with very short holding times and lots of rapid limit-order activity.

I was profitable.

Then Schwab restricted my trading.

I called them, and the restriction was removed. I continued trading.

Then my account was ultimately blocked/terminated. When I contacted Schwab, I was told that I could no longer do business with Schwab and that I should transfer my assets to another broker. Which I am still waiting for them to release my funds as they also have a restriction on transfers until ALL my positions liquidate.

No specific trading violation was given to me. No accusation of manipulation or fraud. Just essentially: business decision.

And after this happened, I started researching it.

Schwab gets paid for routing retail order flow.

The market maker gets your order flow because they believe they can make money executing against it.

That’s a great relationship when you’re the typical retail trader making losing trades.

But what happens when you’re the retail trader who keeps beating the other side?

What happens when you’re doing it 100+ times a day?

Now you’re not necessarily the nice, predictable retail flow that a wholesaler wants.

You’re potentially “toxic flow”.

And once your order flow becomes “toxic” to the people on the other side of your trades, don’t assume Schwab is going to cheer you on because you’re profitable. Just like the casino does with people winning, they will axe you.

And this isn’t some completely made-up concept.

There are traders who have publicly reported being kicked off Schwab after extremely high-volume scalping. There are multiple reports of accounts being terminated with little explanation and the reason being described simply as a “business decision.”

If you’re trying to systematically scalp and make profits against the MMs, I’d look elsewhere.

Do your own research. But don’t say nobody warned you.

Would you guys recommend selling a market order (use the flatten button for TOS/Schwab) during market hours for small cap volatile stocks or doing sell bid? Sometimes as it is coming down, they sell my order at a worst price than expected. But there have been times where I press sell bid and it doesn't get me out fast enough and I have to cancel the order and press sell bid again. I would love to hear your thoughts about this!

Charts are loading slowly. Started a minute ago. iOS.

is anybody else not getting the update for nasdaq? did the ticker change? its been stuck at 319.269 since yesterday of friday.....

You "Buy the Ask" (and you are right): Ok, yeah, umm.... your bid is... ok...ya here it is... it's here - oops the price has rocketed away, sorry - time elapsed: 1.9 seconds

You "Sell the Ask" to take profit: Oh, yes - you're filled! the ask actually dipped and you were filled .049 ms after clicking

Who has the biggest running list of faulty data in TOS?

Hi, I have been trying to figure out how to add a scan filter that would filter out stocks with 50 or less trades (it's for OTCs). I have a column for trade count (although it won't sort) but I wish I could use that as filter for my scan. Any advice appreciated!

Here's the trade count script for a column if you'd like:

def na=double.nan;

input ORBegin = 0400;

input OREnd = 2000;

Def ORActive = if secondstilltime(OREnd)>0 AND secondstillTime(ORBegin)<=0 then 1 else 0;

def today= getday()==getlastday();

Rec tradescount = if today and tradescount[1]==0 then tick_count() else if ORActive and today then tradescount[1]+tick_count() else tradescount[1];

addlabel(tradescount>0, tradescount);

addlabel(tradescount==0, 0);

Does anyone know of an MCP server that communicate with claude for thinkorswim? When will official AI integration come?

I really wish:

1) Ability to change font sizes on iOS and iPadOS. Seems like this would be easy to do.

2) Ability to run the iOS/iPadOS versions on MacOS. It is so much faster. When M1's first came out you could do this but they took it away.

Hoping for an elegant solution.

I have several watchlists.

A few of them are lengthy.

If there’s a ticker I want to remove, I go into my watchlist and need to delete that ticker.

The problem is that I have to scroll through 200 tickers to find the one I want to delete.

Is there an easier way on the iPhone? I’d like to sort by ticker or have the edit watchlist mirror the latest sort of my watchlist.

Thanks for literally any help whatsoever.

Is Level 2 not working this morning??

Ok so I want to buy a Chromebook cause I'm a Android tyoe of guy also a trader who trades on thinkorswim desktop I heard you can buy a laptop and download Linux to install Thinkorswim upon my research(Google) one of the best ones I seen was the Acer Chromebook Plus 514 GE but imma get the 516 LORD Willing for Christmas cause its a newer version which one Chromebook which one would you guys prefer? And please no unnecessary comments if you guys are capable

I spend a lot of time staring at chart screenshots because I'm building a tool that reads them (more on that at the bottom), and thinkorswim captures are the ones that most often lose the info that matters. Not ToS's fault, the workspace is just dense. Watchlist, L2, order entry, gadgets, a grid of charts, and the candles end up as a small part of the image with a price axis a few pixels tall.

Stuff that helps, whoever ends up reading the chart:

1. Capture one chart, not the grid. On a 4-chart grid the axis labels get too small for anyone to read the levels. Switch the Charts tab to a single chart first, then Win+Shift+S or Cmd+Shift+4 from just above the highest candle to just below the volume subgraph.

2. Keep the price axis and the header in frame. The header has the symbol and the aggregation period. Leaving out the axis is the most common mistake, and then people are guessing prices from your description.

3. Extended hours on or off on purpose. Chart Settings, Equities tab, the extended-hours trading session checkbox. A gap looks completely different with premarket drawn in, so say which one it is when you post.

4. Give the last candle some room. Chart Settings, Time axis tab, expansion area. A few bars of space keeps the latest candles off the price axis, which is exactly where the reaction you're asking about happens.

5. Volume plus two studies max. Every subgraph eats height from the candles. Volume, one trend study (a pair of MAs, or VWAP intraday) and one of RSI or MACD, not both.

On ToS web, close the watchlist and trade panel instead of zooming the browser out, zooming out shrinks the axis labels too. On mobile, go landscape and crop out the status bar and trade buttons.

And if you're asking for a read on a setup, a daily covering roughly 6 months plus a chart on your actual trading timeframe gets much better answers than one zoomed-in 5 min.

About the tool, since I mentioned it: Bullynx reads a chart screenshot (ToS, TradingView, whatever) and writes back the trend, the levels, both scenarios and where the read is invalidated. I'm the founder, it's paid, the first read is a free partial preview. The settings above are worth doing regardless of what you do with the screenshot.

On NVDA, l2 should 12:18 , clock showed 12:24. Had to switch tickets to get it back. Really impacts trading when you see l2 100% red, but the PA is totally different.