Upbeat music plays throughout.
Narrator: thinkorswim® puts the power to place futures trades in the palm of your hand. In this demo, I'll show you how to open a short position on a futures contract from my iPhone.
Using the app, you can log in to the live platform or paperMoney®. paperMoney is a trading simulation in the thinkorswim platform that allows you to practice placing trades in real-time market conditions with pretend money. For this example, I'll log in to paperMoney.
From the Overview page, enter a symbol to get a price quote.
For this order, I'll open a short position on the E-Mini S&P 500 Index futures. Because I already know the ticker symbol, I can enter it in the search field. Notice a list appears. The active contract for the ES appears at the top of the list. I'll select it.
To see all of the futures contracts eligible to trade at Schwab, let's pull up the futures watchlist.
To do this, I'll select Watchlists.
Then PUBLIC.
And finally, select FUTURES.
Here the list of active futures contracts appears.
To place an order, I'll select the symbol /ESH24, then Sell. This action opens the order editor.
The order editor allows you to specify order type, quantity, price, and time in force.
For this example, we'll open a short position Notice that the contract quantity is a negative number. To trade more contracts, adjust the number.
Next, we'll set the Order Type. Let's say we want to sell at a price of 5030 or better. I'll select the price and enter 5030 as the limit.
The next line is the Cost of Trade. Cost of trade only represents the commissions and exchange fees for the contract you're trading and not the margin. We'll discuss margin later.
Next up is time in force, shown here as Day. Time in force allows you to determine how long you want the order open. You can choose either Day or GTC. A day order will work throughout the trading day. A GTC, or Good Till Canceled, order works until we cancel it. I'll leave it set to DAY.
I'll select Review to review the details of the order. Notice the buying power, or BP, effect. This is the margin, or the amount needed to enter this position. For this order, the BP effect—or margin—is $16,225.
Now we can review the order ticket one last time. To make any changes, select Edit in the upper left corner. Once I'm satisfied with the details of the order, I'll select Paper Trade. In a live account, this would say Send.
To see if the order filled, select Orders on the bottom menu, then select Filled. A filled order will also show up in the Positions section. Here you can monitor how the trade performs and even create a closing trade.
Now that you know how to place futures trades using the thinkorswim app, you can continue practicing in paperMoney to build your confidence before placing live trades.
On-screen text: [Schwab logo] Own your tomorrow®